United States: The US President Joe Biden has signed a bill, requiring the release of intelligence reports of COVID origin, into law. The law demands the release of a report on potential links between the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic and a laboratory in the Chinese city of Wuhan.

Congress passed and sent the bill to Mr. Biden earlier in March 2023.

“We need to get to the bottom of COVID-19’s origins, including potential links to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. In implementing this legislation, my administration will declassify and share as much of that information as possible,” Mr. Biden said in a statement.

“I share the Congress’s goal of releasing as much information as possible about the origin” of COVID,” the President further remarked.

According to Mr. Biden, in 2021, he had “directed the intelligence community to use every tool at its disposal” to investigate the origins of the virus.

“That work is ongoing, but as much as possible will be released without causing harm to national security,” the statement added.

The bill is supposed to cause political risks for Mr. Biden, who is negotiating a difficult relationship with Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

China rejects the claims that a leak during research at the Wuhan lab could have unleashed the global pandemic.

The COVID-19 outbreak was first detected in 2019 in the eastern Chinese city of Wuhan, leading to almost 7 million deaths worldwide so far, according to official counts, with over a million of them in the US.

The US Energy Department, one of the US agencies investigating the disaster, earlier concluded that the virus probably came from a lab, agreeing with the assessment of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

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