Langley joins the FBI and Energy Department in agreeing that a lab leak is the most likely source of the pandemic.
The news comes after the CIA announced over the weekend that COVID-19 most likely originated from a leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in 2020.
Beijing dismissed the CIA's claim that COVID-19 likely originated from a lab, calling it “extremely unlikely.” The Chinese government pointed to findings from the China-WHO joint expert team, which concluded that a lab leak was highly improbable.
It was unclear the extent to which the agency has collected new intelligence on COVID-19's origins and whether that new evidence was used to formulate the latest assessment.
The problem for the lab-leak position is that the U.S. has never had access to the Wuhan lab and has thus been unable to reach a definitive answer for more than five years. Now that the CIA has at last come to a conclusion, not all scientists are sold on what it has reported, seeing the results as thinly scientifically sourced.
It points the finger at China, even while acknowledging that the spy agency has “low confidence” in its own conclusion of a lab leak in Wuhan. View on euronews
Sen. Tom Cotton took a dig at the liberal media for its early dismissal of he lab-leak hypothesis after the CIA's newly released assessment supporting the theory.
The nuanced finding suggests the agency believes the totality of evidence makes a lab origin more likely than a natural origin.
Ex-CNN editor Chris Cilizza conceded on Monday that he "screwed up" in his assessment of the lab leak theory, suggesting that President Trump was likely right about COVID's origins.
China said Monday it was “extremely unlikely” COVID-19 came from a laboratory, after the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) said it believed the virus had more likely come from a lab rather than natural transmission.
Pharmaron, a Chinese biotech firm, is currently using hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars to test pharmaceuticals on up to 300 beagles per week in Beijing, according to a federal contract