On Monday, U.S. Senator Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) joined five of her Senate Republican colleagues in calling on the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) to release information the Intelligence Community (IC) used to assess the origins of COVID-19, including new intelligence linking the pandemic to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).
The Department of Energy and the Federal Bureau of Investigation have both concluded the pandemic was likely the result of a coronavirus leaking from WIV, while other intelligence agencies are either undecided or believe the virus was a result of natural transmission. Ernst requested that the different intelligence agencies explain how they reached their conclusions.
Ernst and her colleagues write: “Congress should be able to review the independent evaluations without filters, ambiguity or interpretations of the intelligence. There is clear bipartisan support in Congress to make these assessments available immediately in full as evidenced by the unanimous March 1, 2023, Senate passage of the COVID-19 Origin Act to declassify information related to the origin of COVID-19.”
They go on to say: “Secondly, we request a detailed briefing about the process ODNI used to synthesize and develop each final publication and how records from non-IC elements, such as those from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) were obtained and included in the analysis. We request to be briefed about how ODNI ensured that the conclusions represented in the final publications were the most accurate analysis of intelligence derived from all sources…By shielding the independent IC element results, ODNI failed to accurately inform Congress or the American people that the FBI and DOE assessed that the first SARS-CoV-2 human infection was most likely the result of a laboratory-associated incident…”
Senator Ernst recently slammed Democrats and the media for dismissing the Wuhan Lab leak theory and highlighted her effort to permanently debar the Wuhan Institute from receiving U.S. taxpayer dollars. Ernst is also leading the charge to defund EcoHealth Alliance, the group responsible for funneling taxpayer dollars to the Wuhan Institute for risky research on bat coronaviruses.
Read the letter HERE.
