The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) reported that it considers it more likely that the COVID-19 pandemic originated from a leak from a Chinese laboratory rather than from natural causes, although it has little confidence in this conclusion. The report was prepared during the previous Administration of Joe Biden and published by the CIA director, John Ratcliffe, under the new Government of Donald Trump.
"The CIA assesses, with low certainty, that it is more probable that the COVID-19 pandemic has a research-related origin rather than a natural origin, according to the set of available reports," a CIA spokesperson said in a statement. However, the agency continues to evaluate that both research-related origin scenarios and natural origin scenarios for the COVID-19 pandemic remain plausible.
Five years after the pandemic broke out, the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus that causes COVID-19 remains a mystery. The World Health Organization (WHO) is demanding more information from China, while the main hypotheses are infection of humans through animals sold at the Wuhan market and a leak from a Chinese research laboratory.
U.S. intelligence agencies have been divided on the origin of the pandemic, and the new CIA director, Ratcliffe, has long maintained that the virus emerged from a leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
