The World Health Organization (WHO) was “complicit” in helping China’s communist regime cover up the origins of COVID-19, according to Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.).
Speaking with NTD News, The Epoch Times’ sister outlet, Daines on Feb. 27 suggested that the WHO could not be trusted due to its compliance with in China’s attempts to hide the truth of how the pandemic began.
“Based on what we are seeing in the latest intelligence reports about the origin of COVID—that there’s credible evidence now that it may indeed have been a leak out of the Wuhan lab, given the role that WHO played in many ways of being complicit with the Chinese and covering up what happened in Wuhan—I think … you’re going to see a lot of new questions as the evidence continues to come out of Wuhan as to what really happened to the origins of the COVID,” the senator said.
Daines’ remarks came amid calls from his fellow senators for the Biden administration to declassify a U.S. Energy Department report that concluded that the COVID-19 pandemic most likely originated from a Wuhan laboratory leak.
According to a Feb. 26 Wall Street Journal report, the assessment was described in a document update by Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines. The report added that officials who had access to the classified report said the judgement was made with “low confidence,” given the lack of access to China. The FBI, in its own 2021 assessment, came to the same conclusion but with “moderate confidence,” the WSJ said.
As news of the report has spread, cries for transparency have erupted on Capitol Hill, including from Sens. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), and Mike Braun (R-Ind.), all of whom said they felt the information should be declassified.
“The Biden administration has new ‘intel’ pointing to a lab leak,” Braun wrote in a Monday tweet. “The American people deserve to see it!”
The Senate Republicans’ concerns were also shared by their counterparts in the House, as House Oversight and Accountability Committee Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) and Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Chair Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio) called on the Energy Department, State Department, and the FBI to provide documents and testimony on the matter.
“Since April 2, 2020, Committee on Oversight and Accountability Republicans have been investigating the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, including the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s role in obscuring the truth regarding the initial outbreak, and whether any U.S. taxpayer dollars funded the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s (WIV) dangerous gain-of-function research,” the lawmakers wrote in letters to the three departments. “The Select Subcommittee is now the only Committee in Congress with explicit jurisdiction to conduct this wide-ranging and important investigation.”
Uncovering the truth, the congressmen added, “is vital to U.S. national security, critical to the prevention of future pandemics, and will bring some semblance of closure to the families of those who lost loved ones during the pandemic.”
At a White House press briefing on Monday, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby addressed the subject, noting that the president agreed that determining the source of the pandemic was important, but added, “There is not a consensus right now in the U.S. government about exactly how COVID started.”
Braun, responding to that comment via Twitter, said: “Let the American people decide for themselves. Declassify all COVID origins intel.”
The Epoch Times has reached out to the World Health Organization for comment.
From The Epoch Times