The CIA on Saturday offered a new assessment on the origin of the Covid outbreak, saying the coronavirus is “more likely” to have leaked from a Chinese lab than to have come from animals.
But the intelligence agency cautioned it had “low confidence” in this determination.
A spokesperson said that a “research-related origin” of the pandemic “is more likely than a natural origin based on the available body of reporting”.
The decision to release that assessment marks one of the first made by the CIA’s new director John Ratcliffe, appointed by Donald Trump, who took over the agency on Thursday.
Ratcliffe, who served as director of national intelligence during President Trump’s first term, has long favoured the lab leak theory, claiming Covid most likely came from a leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The institute is a 40-minute drive from the Huanan wet market where the first cluster of infections emerged.
In an interview with Breitbart News published on Friday, Ratcliffe said he wanted the CIA to abandon its neutral stance on the origins of the virus and “get off the sidelines”.
“One of the things that I’ve talked about a lot is addressing the threat from China on a number of fronts, and that goes back to why a million Americans died and why the Central Intelligence Agency has been sitting on the sidelines for five years in not making an assessment about the origins of COVID,” he said.
“That’s a day-one thing for me.”
But officials told US media that the new assessment was not based on new intelligence and predates the Trump administration. The review was reportedly ordered in the closing weeks of the Biden administration and completed before Trump took office on Monday.
The review offered on Saturday is based on “low confidence” which means the intelligence supporting it is deficient, inconclusive or contradictory.
There is no consensus on the cause of the Covid pandemic.
Some support a “natural origin” theory, which argues the virus spread naturally from animals, without the involvement of any scientists or laboratories.
The lab leak hypothesis specifically has been hotly contested by scientists, including many who say there is no definitive evidence to back it up. And China has in the past dismissed the lab claim as “political manipulation” by Washington.
Still, the once controversial theory has been gaining ground among some intelligence agencies.
In 2023, FBI Director Christopher Wray told Fox News it was his bureau’s assessment that “the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident”.
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