Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.), the ranking member of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, is pushing for the Biden administration to declassify documents that show scientists at the Department of Energy believe COVID–19 leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China.
Paul believes the American people deserve the full truth and has proposed legislation to make the US government’s intelligence reports on COVID–19 more open to the public. Paul‘s comments come amid reports that the Department of Energy and the FBI have concluded the pandemic arose from a mishap at a Chinese lab.
However, the Central Intelligence Agency has yet to make a judgment on the matter, despite reports that the Department of Energy and the FBI have concluded COVID-19’s origins began in a lab. Other federal agencies believe that the virus likely jumped to humans from an animal host outside a lab, though those findings are made with low confidence.
Throughout 2021, multiple Chinese authorities refused to cooperate with a World Health Organization effort to study the possibility that COVID–19 leaked from a lab, as vice-minister of China’s National Health Commission, Zeng Yixin has dismissed the possibility that COVID-19 intentionally originated in a lab.
