A senior American intelligence official stated that former director of the U.S. intelligence agency William Burns urged analysts and intelligence agencies to make a clear determination regarding the origins of the pandemic. He emphasized the historical importance of this question.
At the same time, the agency announced that it has "low confidence" in its assessment that the "investigative source of the COVID-19 origins is most likely a natural spillover," indicating in its statement that both variants - laboratory and natural - remain on the table.
So far, China has not responded to the request for comment. It is unclear how deep the information collected by the intelligence agency regarding the origins of COVID-19 is and whether this new data was used to formulate the latest assessment.
The Chinese government stated that it supports and participates in studies regarding the origins of COVID-19, accusing Washington of politicizing the issue, especially in light of US intelligence agency findings. Beijing noted that allegations that a leak from a laboratory could be the source of the pandemic have no basis.
In an interview on the news platform Breitbart after confirming his appointment by the U.S. Senate, Director of Central Intelligence John Ratcliffe stated that one of his primary tasks will be to conduct a comprehensive assessment of the origins of the pandemic. He said: "This should happen on the very first day for me."
The representative of the Central Intelligence Agency in the U.S. reported yesterday that the agency has concluded that it is more likely that the entire COVID-19 pandemic originated in a laboratory rather than in nature. The agency had previously been unable to assert whether the pandemic was the result of an incident in a laboratory or arose naturally. "We have already stated that all our data, our intelligence community, and our healthy reasoning indicate that the sources of COVID emerged from a leak at the Institute of Virology in Wuhan."
