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Thursday, 13 February, 2025
HomeCovid-19CIA about-turn on Covid-19 origin

CIA about-turn on Covid-19 origin

In a change of mindset, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has said it was more likely that a laboratory leak caused the Covid-19 pandemic than an infected animal that spread the virus to people. However, a source says the agency has low confidence in this opinion and will not stop evaluating evidence.

The agency made its new assessment public two days after former Republican lawmaker John Ratcliffe was sworn in as its new leader, reports Publico.

“We have low confidence in this judgment and will continue to evaluate any available credible new intelligence reporting or open-source information that could change CIA’s assessment,” an unnamed CIA spokesperson wrote in an email sent to reporters on the weekend.

The statement didn’t include any additional details about what led the agency to change its assessment and whether it had intelligence that would support the theory that the virus had leaked from a research lab in Wuhan, China.

“The CIA continues to assess that both research-related and natural origin scenarios of the Covid-19 pandemic remain plausible,” the statement said.

A US official said former CIA director William Burns had told analysts they needed to take a position on the origins of the pandemic, but that he was agnostic on potential theories.

A new CIA analysis of the intelligence it had on the origin of the virus had been completed and published internally before Ratcliffe’s arrival, the official said. Ratcliffe had authorised its public release.

Why it matters

Congressional Republicans have embraced the unproven lab leak theory, pointing to how the first cases of Covid-19 were reported in Wuhan, where a virology lab was researching coronaviruses at the time.

Still, many virologists have published studies supporting a natural origin, arguing that the virus may have spread among people who were exposed to animals – infected with the virus – that were being sold at a wet market in the city.

The intelligence community had been split on what sparked the pandemic, according to an unclassified assessment from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence published in 2023. At the time, more agencies leaned toward a natural origin for the pandemic.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has backed the lab leak hypothesis with moderate confidence, while the Department of Energy expressed low confidence in the theory.

Ratcliffe, who was the director of national intelligence during President Donald Trump’s first term, suggested at a Heritage Foundation event last year that the CIA’s failure to come to a conclusion about the pandemic’s potential origin reflected “political and financial considerations” instead of the agency’s inability to do so.

Ratcliffe said at the same event that when he became national intelligence director in 2020 – at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic –  he had asked to see the evidence that had prompted the conclusion a few days earlier that the virus had natural origins.

Most of it, he added, said exactly the opposite, “and said exactly what we’ve concluded… that most likely, all of the intelligence that we had –  circumstantial though it may be –  pointed towards this being a research-related incident, not naturally occurring”.

The Chinese Government has consistently denied that the pandemic resulted from a leak at the Wuhan lab.

 

Politico article – CIA now says Covid-19 is more likely to have originated from a lab leak (Open access)

 

See more from MedicalBrief archives:

 

Wuhan virus escape probably accidental – US agencies

 

New studies point Covid origin evidence to Wuhan wet market

 

Covid-19 Wuhan lab escape theory gets a second look

 

Wuhan scientists planned to release coronavirus into bat caves: Leaked papers

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