On March 20, US President Joe Biden signed a law requiring the release of intelligence materials on a potential link between the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic and a biological laboratory in the Chinese city of Wuhan.

"We need to understand the origin of Covid-19, including possible connections with the Wuhan Institute of Virology," said Biden's statement.

"When implementing this law, my administration will declassify and provide as much of this information as possible."

"I share the goal of Congress to release as much information as possible about the origin of Covid," Biden added.

The US president said that in 2021, upon taking office, he "directed the intelligence community to use all investigative tools at its disposal."

That work is "ongoing," but as much material as possible will be released without "harming national security," he said.

The bill presents political risks for Biden amid tensions with Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

Beijing categorically denies the possibility that a leak during research in a Wuhan laboratory could have provoked a global pandemic.

However, most congressmen want to continue developing this theory, and the issue has become a unifying factor, in particular, for Biden's Republican opponents.

Congress passed and sent the bill to Biden in March.

The outbreak of Covid-19 began in 2019 in the eastern Chinese city of Wuhan.

According to official data, almost 7 million people have died worldwide so far, more than a million of them in the United States.

However, public health authorities and the US intelligence community remain divided on whether the virus was accidentally transmitted from an infected animal or leaked during research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

The US Department of Energy — one of the federal agencies that investigated the disaster — concluded with a "low degree of certainty" that the virus likely originated in a lab, agreeing with the FBI's assessment but contradicting the conclusions of several other agencies.