Shellenberger: Biden Admin. ‘Clearly in Violation of the Law’ by Failing to Disclose Names of Sick Wuhan Scientists in COVID Origins Report

On Monday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “America’s Newsroom,” journalist Michael Shellenberger stated that the DNI’s report on the origins of COVID-19 violated the law by failing to disclose the names of researchers who fell ill in 2019.

Shellenberger said, “I think the Biden administration is very clearly in violation of the law that President Biden signed, which explicitly said that the intelligence community should release — the director of national intelligence should release the names of the first people to get COVID, both The Wall Street Journal and our publication, Public, reported the names of the first three people to get the COVID-19 virus in China. … That intelligence is there that the U.S. government has, I’m pretty shocked that they decided not to release it. I also found it extremely suspicious that, at the exact same moment — within hours of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence releasing that very thin report, which had no new information, we also saw the — one of the patients in China, one of the scientists who had been working with the virus, deny that he had been sick with COVID-19 after going almost a week and a half failing to respond to our inquiries and failing to respond to The Wall Street Journal[‘s] inquiries.”

The COVID–19 Origin Act of 2023 requires the declassification of information including “researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology who fell ill in autumn 2019, including for any such researcher— (i) the researcher’s name; (ii) the researcher’s symptoms; (iii) the date of the onset of the researcher’s symptoms;” among other things.

Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett