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.
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.
The CIA now believes the virus responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic most likely originated from a laboratory.
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 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 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.
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