By Katie Bo Lillis, CNN
(CNN) — The CIA now assesses the virus that causes Covid-19 more likely originated from an accidental lab leak in China, rather than occurring naturally, according to a statement from the agency Saturday, just days after Director John Ratcliffe took the reins.
The agency has for years said it did not have enough information to determine which origin theory was more likely — and its new assessment is only a “low confidence” judgment. It still deems that a natural-origin scenario remains possible.
But the determination to declassify and make that assessment public represents one of the first major moves by Ratcliffe, who has long favored the theory that the pandemic originated from research being done in China and vowed in an interview published in Breitbart on Thursday that he would make the issue a Day 1 priority.
“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,” Ratcliffe told Breitbart. “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.”
A US official emphasized the new assessment predates the Trump administration. The agency’s director under former President Joe Biden, Bill Burns, had pushed analysts to take a position on the origins of the pandemic, and this assessment was made and published within the US government before Trump took office Monday, the official said.
It was not made based on new intelligence gathered by the US government — officials have long said such intelligence is unlikely to surface so many years later — and instead was reached after a review of existing information.
“CIA continues to assess that both research-related and natural origin scenarios of the COVID-19 pandemic remain plausible,” a CIA spokesperson said in a statement Saturday.
“We have low confidence in this judgement and will continue to evaluate any available credible new intelligence reporting or open-source information that could change CIA’s assessment.”
Every US intelligence agency still unanimously maintains that Covid-19 was not developed as a biological weapon, but there remains no consensus as to the virus’s origins, according to a report issued by the Office of the Director of Intelligence in 2023.
And almost all American intelligence agencies also assess that the virus itself was not genetically engineered, the report states.
But the intelligence community has been unable to determine with high confidence whether the pandemic originated from a lab leak or occurred in the wild, and has remained divided on that question.
The-CNN-Wire
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