Biden will release Covid-19 origin intelligence

President Joe Biden signed into law Monday a bill to declassify intelligence on the origins of Covid-19, offering the public a chance to review information that government agencies say is inconclusive.

The legislation, called the Covid-19 Origin Act of 2023, which passed the Senate and House with unanimous support earlier this month, orders the Director of National Intelligence to declassify within 90 days of enactment all information relating to potential links between China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology and Covid-19. The director is then to submit the information in a report to Congress. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) sponsored the bill.

In a statement, Biden said he shared "Congress's goal of releasing as much information as possible about the origin" and that he planned now to "declassify and share as much of that information as possible, consistent with my constitutional authority to protect against the disclosure of information that would harm national security."

Why it matters: Biden’s signature is a step further in providing transparency about what the U.S. knows about how the pandemic started.

Some scientists and government agencies have theorized that researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology inadvertently spread Covid-19 to people in the city where the virus first emerged, while others have insisted that an animal more likely transmitted it to people.

The U.S. intelligence community is split about the origin of the pandemic.

The Department of Energy and the FBI have recently said they lean toward the lab leak hypothesis. DOE said it had low confidence in its assessment, while the FBI said its confidence level was moderate. Other agencies support the natural origin theory.

The Wall Street Journal has reported that U.S. intelligence agencies believe three workers at the Wuhan lab were hospitalized in the month before the virus emerged.

A determination that the virus leaked from the Chinese lab would further strain the U.S.-China relationship, and also erode trust in leading scientists who argued for the natural origin hypothesis.

The World Health Organization has said both possibilities remain on the table.

New Chinese data on genetic samples taken in a Wuhan food market in January 2020, which China health authorities briefly made available online in mid-March, don’t provide a definitive answer as to how the Covid-19 pandemic began, the WHO said on Friday in response to media reports that said the data buttressed the natural origin hypothesis by linking the virus to racoon dogs sold at the market.

What’s next: U.S. intelligence agencies will redact their data to protect sources and methods before sharing it with Congress.