WASHINGTON: The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has shifted its official stance on the origin of Covid-19, saying on Saturday that the virus was “more likely” to have leaked from a Chinese laboratory than to have been spread by animals.
The new assessment came after John Ratcliffe was confirmed Thursday as CIA director under Donald Trump’s second White House administration.
“The organization is going to come off the ledge,” Ratcliffe—who believes Covid-19 broke out from the Wuhan Institute of Virology—told Outle Breitbart.
Ratcliffe, who served as director of National Intelligence from 2020-2021 during Trump’s first term, said in an interview published Friday that a “daytime” priority would be to assess the origins of Covid.
“The CIA assesses with low confidence that an investigative origin of the Covid-19 pandemic is more likely than a natural origin based on the available reference body,” a CIA spokesman said in a statement on Saturday.
The agency had not previously ruled on whether Covid was released by a lab accident or was shed by the animals.
“The CIA continues to assess that both the scenarios related to the investigation and the physical origin of the Covid-19 pandemic remain plausible,” the spokesman said.
A US official said AFP The shift was based on a new analysis of existing intelligence ordered by former CIA director William Burns, which was completed before Ratcliffe’s arrival this week.
Some US agencies, such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Department of Energy, support the lab theory, albeit with varying degrees of confidence, while most elements of the intelligence community lean towards a natural origin.
Supporters of the Lab-Reak case point out that the first known cases of Covid-19 appeared in Wuhan, China—a major coronavirus research hub—about 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) from the nearest bat populations that carry similar SARS viruses.
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