(BBC) The CIA on Saturday offered a new assessment on the origin of the Covid outbreak, saying the coronavirus is “more likely” to have leaked from a lab than to have come from animals.
But the intelligence agency cautioned it had “low confidence” in this determination.
A spokesperson said that a “research-related origin” of the pandemic “is more likely than a natural origin based on the available body of reporting”.
The decision to release that assessment marks one of the first made by the CIA’s new director John Ratcliffe, appointed by Donald Trump, who took over the agency on Thursday.
Ratcliffe, who served as director of national intelligence during President Trump’s first term, has long favoured the lab leak theory, claiming Covid most likely came from a leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The institute is a 40-minute drive from the Huanan wet market where the first cluster of infections emerged.
In an interview with Breitbart News published on Friday, Ratcliffe said he wanted the CIA to abandon its neutral stance on the origins of the virus and “get off the sidelines”.
Credit: BBC