The Central Intelligence Agency has updated its official stance on the origins of Covid-19, stating on Saturday that the virus is “more likely” to have leaked from a Chinese lab rather than being transmitted from animals.
This new assessment follows the confirmation of John Ratcliffe as the CIA director on Thursday during the second term of the Trump administration.
Ratcliffe, who served as the director of national intelligence from 2020 to 2021 under Trump’s first term, had previously mentioned in a Friday interview that one of his top priorities was to assess the origins of Covid-19.
“The agency is going to get off the sidelines,” Ratcliffe, who believes the virus leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, told Breitbart, a right-wing news outlet.
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A CIA spokesperson confirmed on Saturday that the agency now assesses, with low confidence, that a research-related origin of the Covid-19 pandemic is more likely than a natural origin, based on available intelligence.
The CIA had previously refrained from making a definitive statement on whether the virus resulted from a lab accident or animal transmission.
However, the spokesperson emphasized that both research-related and natural origin theories are still considered plausible by the agency.
A US official informed AFP that the shift in the CIA’s stance was based on a new analysis of existing intelligence, commissioned by former CIA director William Burns, which was completed prior to Ratcliffe’s appointment.
Some US agencies, such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Energy, support the lab-leak theory, although with varying degrees of certainty, while the majority of the intelligence community continues to favor a natural origin.
Supporters of the lab-leak theory point to the fact that the earliest known Covid-19 cases were reported in Wuhan, China—a major hub for coronavirus research—about 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) from the closest bat populations known to carry similar SARS-like viruses.
