Newly released emails and messages indicate that Fauci may not have been the original source of the suppression idea, even if he soon became a ruthless enforcer of it.
‘[M]y administration will 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,’ Biden said in a statement.
The administration's large ask comes even as the COVID-19 outbreak itself appears more and more likely to have resulted from a leak from a Chinese lab that was conducting virus research.
The measure will require the Biden administration's Director of National Intelligence to declassify all documents pertaining to the origins of the COVID-19 virus.
The bill, introduced by Republican U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, comes after the U.S. Department of Energy concluded that the COVID-19 outbreak ‘most likely’ originated from a Chinese lab leak, a concept previously denounced as a conspiracy theory.
By concealing what they knew about the virus’s unusual features, Fauci and his group of scientists critically hobbled scientific efforts to better understand the virus.