The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) now believes the COVID-19 pandemic most likely started from a laboratory leak, the agency said in a statement on Saturday.
“CIA assesses with low confidence that a research-related origin of the COVID-19 pandemic is more likely than a natural origin based on the available body of reporting,” an agency spokesman said, according to The Wall Street Journal.
The judgement is “low confidence” because the CIA will continue to look at “any available credible new intelligence reporting or open-source information that could change CIA’s assessment,” the spokesman said, according to the report. The statement added that “both research-related and natural origin scenarios of the COVID-19 pandemic remain plausible.”
The Chinese Embassy in Washington did not respond to the Journal’s request for comment by time of publication.
The report comes after new CIA director John Ratcliffe exclusively told Breitbart News in his first interview after being confirmed that one of his “day-one” priorities is to get to the bottom of what the agency knows about COVID-19 leaking from a Wuhan lab in China. He said:
I know from conversations with the president about where his priorities are and where he wants things to be as it concerns foreign threats to America’s national security posture, and it starts with China. 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. That’s a day-one thing for me. I’ve been on record as you know in saying I think our intelligence, our science, and our common sense all really dictates that the origins of COVID was a leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. But the CIA has not made that assessment or at least not made that assessment publicly. So I’m going to focus on that and look at the intelligence and make sure that the public is aware that the agency is going to get off the sidelines.
As Breitbart’s Washington Bureau Chief, Matthew Boyle, reported, the CIA has been mired in controversy on this front for the past several years as a whistleblower alleged that Agency analysts who were tasked with determining how COVID originated were bribed to say it did not come from the Wuhan lab.
“Everyone agrees the virus came from China, but there has been disagreement as to whether it came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology or whether it spread from animals to humans in nature, though the lab leak theory has regained prominence if not dominance in recent years after originally being attacked,” he wrote.
The CIA has not joined the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Energy Department in identifying a leak from a laboratory in Wuhan, China, as the likely source of the pandemic.
In December, a former FBI senior scientist told The Journal that the intelligence community needed to take a fresh look at the origins of the virus. Toward the end of the Biden administration, Joe Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, called for the establishment of a panel of outside experts to look at intelligence agencies’ findings.
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