President Joe Biden's administration reportedly has yet to meet the June 18 deadline required by the COVID-19 Origin Act of 2023, Senate Bill 619, to declassify all data about COVID-19's origins.
Wisconsin Republican U.S. House Rep. Mike Gallagher, chairman of the Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, called on Biden to mind the deadline, according to a June 12 news release. Gallagher cited a report in the Sunday Times that said the CCP, along with scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, were conducting secret research into coronaviruses.
"This report confirms that the CCP was conducting dangerous coronavirus research at ill-equipped labs in the Wuhan Institute of Virology and took dramatic steps to hide their work from the rest of the world," Gallagher said in the release. "It also highlights the lengths at which the Party has gone to prevent transparency and cover-up what happened in Wuhan in the fall of 2019."
Wisconsin Republican U.S. House Rep. Mike Gallagher, chairman of the Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, speaking during a committee meeting in May
| facebook.com/RepMikeGallagher
Gallagher added the U.S. "should be using every tool at its disposal to investigate the origins of the pandemic," the release reported.
"The Biden administration should stop dragging its feet and immediately declassify all the relevant intelligence surrounding COVID-19, as they are legally required to do by June 18," Gallagher added, according to the release. "The clock is ticking.”
Gallagher reintroduced the House version of the COVID-19 Origin Act of 2023, House Bill 1346, following a U.S. Department of Energy classified intelligence report that found the COVID-19 pandemic likely originated from a lab leak, according to a March 3 release.
“In March of 2020, COVID shut down the world and upended our lives, Gallagher said in a March 10 release. "But almost three years later, we still don’t understand how this virus began thanks to the CCP’s work to prevent any meaningful investigation into the origins of this virus. The American people deserve answers, and as I’ve said since 2021 when I first introduced this bill, we don’t have to wait for Xi Jinping to open up the Wuhan Institute of Virology to get them."
In the March 10 release, Gallagher said it is within the authority of the Biden administration to declassify relevant information about the COVID-19 virus, yet they continue to refuse.
"That’s unacceptable, and I’m glad Congress is finally forcing their hand and acting – in overwhelming bipartisan fashion – to force the administration to finally declassify all its intelligence surrounding COVID,” Gallagher added, according to the March 10 release.
The House Foreign Affairs Committee, chaired by Texas Repubican Rep. Michael McCaul, issued a statement about the Wuhan lab leak and subsequent "cover-up by the Chinese Communist Party." The committee statement said CCP leaders should be held accountable "but it has no ethnic or cultural connection to the Chinese people or the millions of Asian-Americans who contribute to our great nation."
CCP leaders knew about the coronavirus in early December 2019 "but took aggressive steps to hide it from the public," the statement said. Those steps steps included detaining doctors who warned about the virus, destroying testing samples, suppressing information, censoring doctors and journalists and allowing "high ranking diplomats to spread false conspiracies about the origin of the virus," the statement said.
"This is a cover-up by the Chinese Communist Party, which has now led to one of the worst pandemics we’ve ever seen," McCaul said in the statement. "The World Health Organization did not protect the world from this pandemic, and I consider them to be co-conspirators with the Chinese Communist Party."
