WASHINGTON - US President Joe Biden signed a bill that requires the Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines to declassify information related to the origins of COVID- 19, the White House said.
Biden said that he shared Congress' goal of releasing as much information as possible about the origin of COVID - 19. He said that his administration would keep national security in mind when deciding what to release.
In implementing this legislation, my administration will declassify and share as much of that information, consistent with my constitutional authority to protect against the disclosure of information that would harm national security, Biden said in a statement.
The bill was passed in the Senate and House of Representatives unanimously before being sent to the White House.
Washington has been involved in a debate on the origins of the coronaviruses since the first human cases were reported in the Chinese city of Wuhan in late 2019, amid calls from Biden's fellow Democrats and Republicans to push back harder against a rising China.
The debate was refuelled last month when the Wall Street Journal reported that the US Energy Department had low confidence that the outbreak may have arisen from a Chinese laboratory leak, an assessment Beijing denies.
There isn't a definitive conclusion from the US intelligence community on the origins of the COVID-19 epidemic.