CIA says lab leaks probably source of outbreak

The CIA offered a new assessment of the origin of the Covid outbreak on Saturday and said coronavirus is “more likely” to have leaked from a Chinese laboratory than to have come from animals.

But the intelligence agency warned that it had “low confidence” in this determination.

A spokesman said a “research -related origin” of the pandemic “is more likely than a natural origin based on the available reporting body”.

The decision to release this assessment marks one of the first to be made by 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 period, has long favored the laboratory -leakage theory and claimed that Covid probably came from a leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

The institute is a 40-minute drive from the wet market in Huanan, where the first cluster of infections appeared.

In an interview with Breitbart News, published on Friday, Ratcliffe said he wanted the CIA to give up its neutral attitude towards the virus’s origin and “go off the sidelines”.

“One of the things I’ve talked about a lot is by not making an assessment of the origin of Covid,” he said.

“It’s a day-a thing for me.”

But officials told us media that the new assessment was not based on new intelligence and the Trump administration is taking place. The review was allegedly ordered in the final weeks of the Biden administration and completed before Trump joined Monday.

The review offered on Saturday is based on “low confidence”, which means that the intelligence support, it is defective, indispensable or contradictory.

There is no consensus on the cause of the covid pandemic.

Some support a “natural origin” theory that argues that the virus spread naturally from animals without the involvement of researchers or laboratories.

Lab leak hypothesis has been specifically Hotly disputed by scientistsIncluding many who say there is no final proof to back up it. And China has previously rejected the laboratory requirement as “political manipulation” by Washington.

Still, the once controversial theory has been given a place among some intelligence agencies.

In 2023, the FBI director Christopher Wray told Fox News that it was his agency’s assessment that “the origin of the pandemic is probably a potential laboratory event”.