Langley joins the FBI and Energy Department in agreeing that a lab leak is the most likely source of the pandemic.
The CIA now believes the virus responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic most likely originated from a laboratory.
On Saturday, new CIA Director john Ratcliffe made public the CIA’s reassessment that shifts from an inconclusive position to now believing the lab-leak was most likely despite a low level of confidence.
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.
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.
The Central Intelligence Agency with a "low confidence" has changed its stance and concluded that it's likely the COVI-19 virus was leaked from a Chinese lab before it became a global pandemic five years ago.
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.
China is building a new military command centre near Beijing that is 10 times the size of the Pentagon, US intelligence officials have said.
The Show Me State vows to seize $25 billion in Chinese assets if Beijing doesn't pay damages related to the outbreak of COVID-19.
"China is hell-bent on world domination," and additional tariffs on the country would hurt the dairy industry, exclaimed Eric Traupe, former assistant director of the CIA for the Near East, during a Jan. 28 lunch session speech at IDFA Dairy Forum in San Antonio.
Warren P. Strobel is a reporter at The Washington Post covering U.S. intelligence. He has written about U.S. security policies under seven presidents, and reported from Europe, the Middle East and West Africa.