CIA says Covid-19 probably escaped Chinese lab but doesn't rule out natural origin

 

The US Central Intelligence Agency says Covid-19 probably leaked from a Chinese research lab but has "low confidence" in its conclusion, according to the Associated Press and other international media.

The global pandemic has killed some 7 million people since it brought the world to a virtual standstill in 2020, according to the World Health Organisation.

At the height of the crisis, suggestions that the virus could be the product of research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology were dismissed as conspiracy theories. Social media companies suppressed posts making the claim.

Yet the CIA now suspects that the 'lab-leak theory' is more likely than not to be true. The agency had previously been on the fence as to the pandemic's origins.

However, in a declassified report released on Saturday, the CIA said it only had "low confidence" in its conclusion. It said the new conclusion does not rule out the possibility that Covid-19 was of natural origin.

It said the "CIA continues to assess that both research-related and natural origin scenarios of the COVID-19 pandemic remain plausible,” according to the Financial Times.

The new report was commissioned by the previous Biden administration and the now-departed CIA director William Burns, the Associated Press reports.

Newly-elected US President Donald Trump appointed John Ratcliffe as the new CIA director on Thursday. Ratcliffe ordered that the report be declassified and released.