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May 27 (UPI) -- The U.S. Senate has passed a bill to direct National Intelligence Director Avril Haines to declassify all information about potential links between the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the origins of the coronavirus pandemic. The bill, S. 1867, passed the Senate on Wednesday night, and will go to the House for consideration.
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If enacted, the bill gives the national intelligence agency 90 days to declassify all information it has linking the pandemic to the virology laboratory located in Wuhan, the central Chinese city where the virus first emerged in late 2019 before infecting the world over, killing millions of people.
The bill focuses on a State Department notice published on Jan. 15 that states it has reason to believe "several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common illnesses."
Among the information to be declassified if the bill becomes law are the activities performed at the lab and identifying information about the researchers who fell ill.
Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., who introduced the bill with Sen. Mike Braun, R-Ind., in April, told lawmakers from the Senate floor before the passing of the bill that the public should know the truth about the coronavirus pandemic.
"The American people deserve to know about the origins of COVID-19," he said. "They deserve to know how this terrible pandemic that has ravaged the globe and our country, how it got started, what China's role was in starting it."
Hawley, who has proposed several bills and issued several statements against China amid the pandemic, told lawmakers there is growing scrutiny of the Wuhan laboratory in connection to the start of the pandemic, and that declassifying the information will allow the American people to make up their own minds on the matter.
"It's time they actually got to see the evidence that the United States government has collected on this issue," he said.
Braun added that they need "to get to the bottom" of the virus' origins.
"Who disagrees with transparency?" he asked.
The bill was passed hours after President Joe Biden asked U.S. intelligence agencies to double their efforts to find the origins of the pandemic with the U.S. intelligence community having "coalesced" around two scenarios: that the virus transferred to humans from another infected animal or "a laboratory accident."
The renewed scrutiny over what was deemed a conspiracy theory concerning the virus' origins follows a report published in March by a team of WHO experts who said the virus most likely infected humans from another animal while discrediting the possibility of it having come from the lab as "extremely unlikely."
The WHO investigation team made it to Wuhan more than a year after the virus emerged and following months of push back and delays by China, which had said such a study was unnecessary.
After the study was published, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said China had withheld data from the researchers. He said he didn't think the study "was extensive enough." Fourteen nations, including the United States, also called on China to be transparent and grant full access to the information.
Earlier this month, 18 scientists published a letter in the journal Science calling for another investigation as there wasn't enough information to rule out the possibility that the virus did not escape from the lab.
"Only four pages of the 313 pages of the [WHO] report and its annexes addressed the possibility of a laboratory accident," they said. "Notably, WHO Director-General Tedros Ghebreyesus commented that the report's consideration of evidence supporting a laboratory accident was insufficient and offered to provide additional resources to fully evaluate the possibility."
On Tuesday, Xavier Becerra, U.S. secretary of Health and Human Services, urged the World Health Assembly to conduct a second study of the virus' origins.
Zhao Lijian, China's foreign ministry spokesman, told reporters Wednesday that China had led the investigation into the origins producing an "authoritative study report" that contained "significant conclusions" and those in the United States raising concerns over it were acting out of political manipulation.
"Every time when the issue of pandemic is brought up, they smear and attack China while totally ignoring the doubts over the origin-tracing work and failure of pandemic response in the U.S.," he said. "They are obsessed with spreading 'lab leak theory' and other conspiracy theories and disinformation."
