CIA Shifts Toward Lab Leak Theory on COVID

Agreeing with the FBI and the Energy Department, the CIA announced Saturday that it's decided the COVID outbreak probably began with a laboratory leak in Wuhan, China. "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," the statement said. The agency had maintained until now that it didn't have enough information to make an assessment on whether the virus made the leap from an animal to a human or leaked from a lab, the Wall Street Journal reports.

The CIA's shift wasn't caused by new intelligence, NBC News reports, but by a fresh review of existing information. The outgoing Biden administration recently ordered the review, which was finished before President Trump was sworn in. CIA Director John Ratcliffe, who was sworn in on Thursday, has said he considers a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology the most likely explanation and approved declassifying the new assessment. In an interview with Breitbart News posted Friday, Ratcliffe said he wanted the CIA to "get off the sidelines" and issue a definitive conclusion.

COVID-19 surfaced in late 2019 in Wuhan before spreading globally for the next two years until vaccines brought it under control. The CIA said it will still review any new intelligence or other information that becomes available and might change its "low confidence" assessment. There was no official response from China on Saturday, though in the past its government has said the US has tried to "smear" the nation with false accusations about the origins of the virus. US intelligence officials have said the issue may never be fully resolved, per the AP, partly because of a lack of cooperation from China. (More Central Intelligence Agency stories.)