The National Defense Authorization Act calls for “declassification” and “transparency” related to the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, requiring the Trump Administration’s spy agencies to release its intelligence related to the Wuhan lab that the coronavirus is suspected of being released from in 2019.

The text of the yearly NDAA largely focused on funding the U.S. military and clocks in at nearly 3,100 pages. It includes a section calling upon Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard to work with the heads of all eighteen U.S. spy elements to “perform a declassification review of intelligence” related to “the origins of Coronavirus Disease 2019,” and related to “efforts by government officials of entities of the People’s Republic of China” to cover up the origins of the pandemic.

"DNI Gabbard remains committed to declassifying COVID-19 information and looks forward to continued work with Congress to share the truth about pandemic-era failures with the American people,” a spokesperson for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) told Just the News.

Prominent scientists and media outlets repeatedly claimed that the virus came from a "wet market." The White House says that "The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2” publication — which was used repeatedly by public health officials and the media to discredit the lab leak theory — was prompted by Dr. Fauci to push the preferred narrative that COVID-19 originated in nature. The Los Angeles Times went as far to say "The COVID lab leak claim isn’t just an attack on science, but a threat to public health."

A half dozen years after the start of a global pandemic, the Trump Administration has begun a renewed push to get to the bottom of the origins of COVID-19, with more and more evidence — including by non-U.S. intelligence agencies — indicating that it came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. But vast reams of intelligence related to the origins of the virus remain classified, and Congress is looking to prod the Trump intelligence community to be more forthcoming.

SARS-CoV-2 — the virus behind the COVID-19 pandemic — first emerged in China’s megacity of Wuhan, which was home to the world’s biggest research lab focused on SARS-like viruses. The Wuhan lab conducted risky gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses.

The Chinese government for years has continued to deflect from the Wuhan lab leak possibility, including by pushing the baseless conspiracy theory that COVID-19 originated from a U.S. military base.

Gabbard forms a team to start reviewing for declassification

Gabbard said during her Senate confirmation in January that many senators had “expressed bipartisan frustration about recent intelligence failures and the lack of responsiveness to your requests for information” including related to “failures to identify the source of the COVID.”

She announced the establishment of the Director’s Initiatives Group (DIG) in April with the goals of “investigating weaponization, rooting out deep-seeded politicization, exposing unauthorized disclosures of classified intelligence, and declassifying information that serves a public interest.”

The ODNI says that the DIG is “reviewing documents for potential declassification — including information related to COVID-19 origins.”

An ODNI official told Just the News that Gabbard and her team are working hard to investigate intelligence failures related to COVID-19, including investigating possible suppression of the lab leak hypothesis within the intelligence community and carrying out a wide-ranging review of U.S.-funded gain-of-function research.

The official also said ODNI is coordinating with other spy agency elements such as the FBI and Department of Energy to share details about COVID-19 inquiries.

The ODNI official added that Gabbard’s office had provided Congress with requested documents on COVID origins, including records that were improperly withheld by the Biden Administration. Gabbard’s office is also interviewing whistleblowers and weighing the declassification of further records, the official said.

Defense bill shines spotlight on Wuhan lab

Section 6803 of the text of the newly-public NDAA — located two-thirds of the way into the lengthy defense bill — calls for “Declassification of Intelligence and Additional Transparency Measures Relating to the COVID-19 Pandemic.”

The bill, if passed by the House and Senate as well as signed into law by the president, would require Gabbard and the ODNI to perform two separate declassification reviews related to COVID-19.

The first declassification review, on the origins of the virus, calls for Gabbard to review the intelligence on “research conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology or any other medical or scientific research center within the People’s Republic of China” and “information relating to Gain of Function research and the intention of this research.” This review would also need to look into “information relating to sources of funding or direction for research on coronaviruses, including both sources within the People’s Republic of China and foreign sources.”

The second declassification review would call upon ODNI to look at the intelligence on the Chinese government’s efforts “to disrupt or obstruct information sharing or investigations into the origins” of COVID-19 and “to disrupt the sharing of medically significant information relating to the transmissibility and potential harm of SARS–CoV–2 to humans.” This review would also need to review China’s attempts “to deny the sharing of information with the United States, allies and partners of the United States, or multilateral organizations, including the United Nations and the World Health Organization” as well as Chinese efforts “to pressure or lobby” governments, organizations, and officials related to COVID-19.

This latter declassification review would also require Gabbard to review the intelligence on China’s efforts to “promote alternative narratives” — including conspiracy theories — “regarding the origins of COVID–19.”

The NDAA calls upon Gabbard to “release publicly the intelligence products” described above and to “submit to the congressional intelligence committees an unredacted version of the declassified intelligence products.”

Efforts to convince Biden Admin to release intel on COVID-19’s origins largely fall flat

By most accounts, the Biden Administration largely failed to shed further light on the origins of COVID-19. Then-President Joe Biden signed into law the “COVID-19 Origin Act of 2023” and claimed that “my administration will declassify and share as much of that information as possible.” Little key information was released during his presidency, and reports have emerged that important findings were suppressed.

Then-DNI Avril Haines released an assessment in August 2021 stating that at least one U.S. agency — revealed later to be the FBI — had “moderate confidence” that COVID-19 came from the lab, while four U.S. spy agencies and the National Intelligence Council believed with “low confidence” that COVID-19 most likely had a natural origin.

Then-FBI Director Christopher Wray later confirmed that the FBI has long believed COVID-19 originated at a Chinese government lab. ODNI released in October 2021 a declassified version of the FBI’s arguments in a section titled “The Case for the Laboratory-Associated Incident Hypothesis.” 

It was also revealed in 2023 that the Energy Department — home to advanced research facilities such as the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories — also believed with “low confidence” that the coronavirus started at a Wuhan lab.

During the second Trump Administration, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., the chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, subpoenaed 14 governmental agencies — including the CIA, the Defense Department, the NSA, the FBI, and others — in late January “in connection with the origins of COVID-19 and taxpayer-funded gain-of-function research.”

Paul sent a letter to Gabbard in October to “request records related to the Committee’s ongoing investigation into the origins of COVID-19 and risky life sciences research” and argued that “I have obtained information that leads me to believe the Intelligence Community is in possession of records critical to the Committee’s ongoing inquiry.”

Among numerous requests in the letter, Paul asked Gabbard for “all records” dating back more than a decade related to “COVID-19 origins,” “Wuhan Institute of Virology,” “EcoHealth Alliance,” “gain-of-function research,” and much more.

Some progress on COVID-19 origins during second Trump Admin

CIA Director and former DNI John Ratcliffe had testified to Congress in April 2023 that the CIA and other spy agencies had enough evidence to get off the fence and to join the FBI and Energy Department in concluding that SARS-CoV-2 most likely originated at the Wuhan lab, and hinted that the U.S. intelligence community was holding back because of the significant ramifications such public conclusions would have for the U.S.-China relationship.

The CIA, under Ratcliffle, revealed in January that "CIA assesses with low confidence that a research-related origin of the COVID-19 pandemic is more likely than a natural origin based on the available body of reporting” while at the same time that the "CIA continues to assess that both research-related and natural origin scenarios of the COVID-19 pandemic remain plausible."

Ratcliffe contended in April 2023 that “a lab leak is the only explanation credibly supported by our intelligence, by science, and by common sense” and that “if our intelligence and evidence supporting a lab leak theory was placed side by side with our intelligence and evidence pointing to a naturally occurring ‘spillover’ theory, the lab leak side of the ledger would be long and overwhelming while the ‘spillover’ side would be nearly empty.”

The German Federal Intelligence Service, known as the BND, reportedly concluded that it was very likely that the pandemic emerged as an accidental lab release from the Wuhan lab, according to German news reports this year, but the BND was blocked from sharing their conclusions with the world, according to a joint investigation by German news outlets Zeit and Süddeutsche Zeitung. 

The Trump White House earlier this year set up a website about the “Lab Leak: The True Origins of COVID-19.”

“The virus possesses a biological characteristic that is not found in nature … Wuhan is home to China’s foremost SARS research lab, which has a history of conducting gain-of-function research (gene altering and organism supercharging) at inadequate biosafety levels,” the White House website says. “Wuhan Institute of Virology researchers were sick with COVID-like symptoms in the fall of 2019, months before COVID-19 was discovered at the wet market. … By nearly all measures of science, if there was evidence of a natural origin it would have already surfaced. But it hasn’t.”

Two reports released earlier this year also pointed to a possible cover-up by the Biden-era Pentagon related to the search for COVID-19’s origins.

A recently-released Defense Department report, made public only this spring by the Trump-led Pentagon, showed that the Defense Department never formally investigated the possibility that U.S. service members may have been infected with COVID-19 during the World Military Games in Wuhan in the fall of 2019.

The public report — released after more than two years — concluded that there was no significant uptick at military bases tied to the participating athletes, but also revealed that the Pentagon had not tested the service members for COVID-19 nor for antibodies, admitting that “DoD has not conducted or opened an investigation into connections between the outbreak of COVID-19 and the 2019 World Military Games.”

And a recently-released analysis by a unit of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), made public through the Freedom of Information Act earlier this year, showed that the DIA’s National Center for Medical Intelligence (NCMI) believed early on in the pandemic that a Wuhan lab leak was plausible despite efforts by allies of Fauci to dismiss the possibility.

Wuhan lab leak evidence keeps stacking up

Dr. Robert Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention under Trump, said in early 2021 that COVID-19 likely originated through an accidental escape from the Wuhan lab.

Another document supporting the lab leak hypothesis was referred to in a 2021 interview with Trump's State Department head Mike Pompeo. Pompeo reportedly said in an interview with The Washington Examiner that “Since the outbreak, the WIV has not been transparent nor consistent about its work with RaTG13 or other similar viruses, including possible ‘gain of function’ experiments to enhance transmissibility or lethality."

The Republican-led Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus also concluded in December that “COVID-19 most likely emerged from a laboratory in Wuhan” and warned that “the Chinese government, agencies within the U.S. government, and some members of the international scientific community sought to cover up facts concerning the origins of the pandemic.”

The Fauci factor

Scientists consulting with the U.S. government early in the pandemic in 2020 believed COVID-19 originating from a lab in Wuhan was possible or even likely, yet emails indicate Dr. Anthony Fauci and then-National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Dr. Francis Collins colluded to shut the hypothesis down. Emails also show Fauci and others “prompted” an influential scientific paper that pushed back on the Wuhan lab leak hypothesis in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic.

Fauci has insisted for years that NIH grants did not fund gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab. Dr. Fauci has also repeatedly defended U.S. funding going to bat coronavirus research in China. Later, Sen. Paul sent a criminal referral to then-Attorney General Merrick Garland in the summer of 2021, insisting that the Justice Department consider prosecuting Fauci for allegedly lying to Congress. Garland delayed the request, and later Fauci was granted a full pardon by then-President Joe Biden in January.

EcoHealth Alliance under the spotlight

Peter Daszak, the now-former leader of the EcoHealth Alliance, steered large sums of U.S. taxpayer dollars from NIH funding to the Wuhan lab for bat virus research, a Government Accountability Office study showed. Science magazine noted that Daszak was a longtime collaborator with the Wuhan lab and its leader Shi Zhengli, sometimes referred to as the “bat woman."

Daszak helped organize a February 2020 letter in The Lancet which praised China’s response and called the lab leak a conspiracy theory: “The rapid, open, and transparent sharing of data on this outbreak is now being threatened by rumours and misinformation around its origins. We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin … Conspiracy theories do nothing but create fear.”

Despite this, Fauci tried to argue to the BBC in 2022 that the letter did not dismiss the lab leak hypothesis.

EcoHealth Alliance had proposed the creation at the Wuhan lab of a virus with features — such as a furin cleavage site — strikingly similar to those found in SARS-CoV-2. It was revealed by The Intercept that EcoHealth had sought funding from the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency for this project in 2018, but when the funding was rejected it appears the Wuhan lab moved forward anyway, just a year ahead of the first emergence of COVID-19.

Daszak, who no longer leads EcoHealth, has reportedly sued his former employer, and has also been petitioning to impeach Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr., and recently organized a protest in Washington, D.C., against what he claims is the Trump administration’s “war on science.”

The WHO’s failures amidst Chinese obstruction

The WHO has so far flailed at providing answers related to the origins of COVID-19 when pressed for more detail.

The WHO-China COVID-19 origins joint study report in March 2021 contended that a lab leak was “extremely unlikely” and that a jump from animals to animals to humans was most likely. The report was widely considered a failure, partly due to the lack of access to key data and Chinese influence over the investigation. The meeting minutes from discussions between Wuhan lab scientists and the WHO-China team revealed that lab leak concerns were dismissed as “rumors,” “myths,” and “conspiracy theories.”

Matt Pottinger, Trump’s former deputy national security adviser, called the WHO-China inquiry a “Potemkin exercise.” Then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken also cast doubt on the WHO-China report by saying that “we’ve got real concerns about the methodology and the process that went into that report, including the fact that the government in Beijing apparently helped to write it.”

The WHO’s Peter Ben Embarek admitted in February 2021 that “we didn’t do an audit of any of these labs, so we don’t really have hard facts or detailed data on the work done” at the Wuhan lab. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, head of WHO, was also forced to admit in March 2021 that the WHO-China team had not fully investigated the lab leak possibility and insisted that “all hypotheses remain on the table.”

Trump had withdrawn the U.S. from the WHO in 2020 over its pandemic-related failures, and he withdrew from the UN agency again in January of this year after Biden had made the move to rejoin the WHO in early 2021. Trump said at the start of his new term that the U.S. was leaving the WHO "due to the organization’s mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic that arose out of Wuhan" and "its inability to demonstrate independence from the inappropriate political influence of WHO member states."

The WHO also claimed that Chinese government obstruction stopped them from properly investigating the lab leak hypothesis. “Much of the information needed to assess hypothesis #2, of an accidental laboratory related event, either during field investigations or a breach in laboratory biosafety or biosecurity, has not been made available to WHO or SAGO,” the report said. 

“WHO has made several requests to the Government of China to provide health records of staff and documentation on biosafety and biosecurity practices and procedures in laboratories in Wuhan, including the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) and the Chinese Centers for Disease Control in Wuhan.”

China continues to obfuscate on COVID-19

The Chinese government still denies the coronavirus originated in the Wuhan lab and has tried to cast doubt on the idea that it even originated in China. The CCP is also continuing to deflect from the Wuhan lab leak possibility by pushing a baseless theory that COVID-19 originated with the U.S. military base.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry responded to the CIA’s new assessment in January by arguing that “the U.S. needs to stop politicizing and weaponizing origins-tracing at once, and stop scapegoating others” and attempting to point the finger at “relevant U.S. biological labs.”

China responded to the new revelations about German intelligence last week by pointing to the flawed WHO-China assessment from 2021 and by claiming that “we firmly oppose all forms of political manipulation.” At the same time, the BBC chronicled China's extensive efforts to censor journalism about COVID and Wuhan, in some cases eliminating journalists' entire body of work from what free speech advocates call "The Great Firewall."

The NDAA aims to prompt Gabbard and the ODNI to reveal what it knows about the Wuhan lab and COVID-19’s origins — and to publicly release details about the Chinese government’s campaign of disinformation and obstruction.