CIA is now favors LABLEGAGE -Theory to explain Covid’s Origin

The CIA has for years said that it did not have enough information to conclude whether the covide pandemic originated naturally from a wet market in Wuhan, China or from an unintentional leak in a research laboratory there.

But the agency issued a new assessment this week in which analysts said they are now favoring the laboratory theory.

There is no new intelligence behind the agency’s shifts, officials said. Rather, it is based on the same evidence that it has chewed over for months.

However, the analysis is partly based on a closer look at the conditions in the high security laboratories in Wuhan province before pandemic outbreaks, according to people who are familiar with the agency’s work.

A spokeswoman for the Agency said the other theory remains plausible and that the agency will continue to evaluate any available credible new intelligence reporting.

Some US officials say the debate means a little: The Chinese government did not fail to regulate its markets nor oversee its laboratories. But others claim that it is an important intelligence and scientific question.

John Ratcliffe, the new director of the CIA, has long favored the Lab Leak Hypothesis. He has said that it is a critical piece of intelligence to be understood and that it has consequences for US-Chinese conditions.

The message of the change came shortly after Mr. Ratcliffe told Breitbart News He no longer wanted the agency “on the sidelines” of the debate on the origin of the covid pandemic. Mr. Ratcliffe has long said he believes the virus probably emerged from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Officials said the agency did not bend its views to a new boss and that the new assessment had been in the works for some time.

In the last weeks of the Biden administration, Jake Sullivan ordered the national security adviser, a new classified review of Pandema’s origin. As part of this review, the agency’s former director, William J. Burns, analysts told them they had to take an attitude about the origin of Covid, though he was Agnostic, as the theory to embrace, said a senior American intelligence officer .

Another senior American official said it was Mr. RatCliffe’s decision to declassify and release the new analysis.

Since the outbreak of pandemic, the questions have swirled around whether the two laboratories handling coronavirus in Wuhan had followed security protocols strictly enough.

The agency made its new assessment with “low confidence”, which means that the intelligence behind it is fragmentary and incomplete.

Even in the absence of hard intelligence, Lab Leak Hypothesis has won a place in spy agencies. But some analysts question wisdom by changing a position in the absence of new information.

Former officials say they are not reluctant to a new study of the Covid origin -in -law effective from the Trump administration. President Biden ordered a new review of the intelligence early in his administration after officials told the White House that they had still provided evidence.

Mr. Ratcliffe has raised questions about politicization in the intelligence agencies. Mr. Ratcliffe, director of national intelligence in the first Trump administration, argued in an essay for Fox News in 2023 that the CIA did not want to embrace the laboratory to avoid geopolitical problems for the bite administration.

“The real problem is that the only assessment the Agency could make is that a virus that killed over a million Americans comes from a CCP-controlled laboratory whose research included work for the Chinese military-has huge geopolitical consequences , which the Biden administration does not want to meet head-on, ”he said in the play written with Cliff Sims, a top helper. CCP refers to China’s Communist Party.

Senator Tom Cotton, Republican from Arkansas and the new chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has long said he believed the pandemic stems from one of the Wuhan laboratories and praised the judgment of the agency.

“Now the most important thing is to get China to pay to free a plague in the world,” said Mr. Cotton.

Mr. Ratcliffe said Thursday when he was sworn in that a look at the origin of Covid was a “day 1” priority.

“I think our intelligence, our science and our common sense all really dictate that the origin of Covid was a leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” he told Breitbart. “But the CIA has not made this assessment or at least did not make that assessment in public. So I want to focus on it and look at intelligence and make sure the public is aware that the agency is going to go off the sidelines. “

Senior intelligence officials in Biden -Administration defend their process and methodology. They have said that no intelligence was suppressed and insists that politics did not play into their analysis.

These officials say there are powerful logical arguments for both the laboratory and the natural causing theories, but that there is simply no crucial piece of intelligence on each side of the subject.

To increase the natural origins theory, intelligence officers would like to find the animal that transferred it to a human or find a bat that carries what was the probable ancestor of coronavirus causing covid.

Similarly, in order to seal the laboratory, the intelligence community would like to find evidence that one of the laboratories in Wuhan was working on a ancestor virus that directly led to the epidemic.

None of the evidence is found.

But Mr. Ratcliffe has promised a more aggressive CIA and it is possible that he will order more actions to enter the laboratories in Wuhan or the Chinese government in a search for information.

It won’t be an easy secret to stealing. The senior ranks of the Chinese government do not know and will not know, US officials said. So if there is intelligence, it’s probably hidden in a place that is hard to get to.

Intelligence officials who were interviewed in recent weeks say it is possible that there is such evidence in a laboratory in China, at least in theory. But they said it is still more likely that the answers to questions about the origin of the virus will come through a scientific breakthrough, not an intelligence role.

During the Biden administration, the intelligence community read against the theory that the virus came from the market. But officials easily admitted that it was hardly a sure thing.

Five agencies, including National Intelligence Council and Defense Intelligence Agency, considered that natural exposure probably caused the epidemic. But they said they had only low confidence in their assessment.

Until now, two agencies, the FBI and the Department of Energy, a lab leakage was more likely. But their theories are different. The FBI believes the virus came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The energy department put its efforts in another laboratory, the Wuhan Center for Disease Control.

Officials would not say whether the CIA believes that one laboratory or the other was the more likely source of the virus.