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Washington (AP)-The CIA now believes that the virus responsible for the Covid-19 pandemic is most likely to come from a laboratory, according to an assessment released on Saturday, pointing the finger to China, even while recognizing that the espion agency has. ” make confidence ”to its own conclusion.
The finding is not the result of any new intelligence service and the report was completed at the request of the Biden administration and former CIA director William Burns. It was declassified and released on Saturday after the order of President Donald Trump’s election to lead the agency, John Ratcliffe, who was taken in as a director on Thursday.
The nuanced finding suggests that the agency believes that the overall evidence makes a laboratory origin more likely than a natural origin. But the agency’s assessment assigns a low degree of confidence in this conclusion, suggesting that the evidence is deficient, inconclusive or contradictory.
Previous reports of the origin of Covid-19 have shared whether Coronavirus emerged from a Chinese laboratory, potentially by mistake, or whether it occurred naturally. The new assessment is likely to determine the debate. In fact, intelligence officials say it may never be resolved due to lack of cooperation from Chinese authorities.
The CIA “continues to assess that both research-related and natural origin scenarios for the Covid-19 pandemic remain plausible,” the agency wrote in a statement of its new assessment.
Instead of new evidence, the conclusion was based on fresh analyzes of intelligence on the spread of the virus, its scientific properties and work and conditions in China’s virological laboratories.
Legislators have pushed America’s espion agencies to get more information about the origin of the virus, which led to shutdowns, economic upheavals and millions of deaths. It is a question of significant domestic and geopolitical implications as the world continues to fight with the heritage of pandemic.
Republican Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, president of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said on Saturday that he was “glad that in the last days of the Biden administration, the CIA concluded that the theory of laboratory leakage is the most plausible explanation” and he praised Ratcliffe in order to defeat the assessment.
“Now the most important thing is to get China to pay to trigger a plague in the world,” Cotton said in a statement.
China’s Embassy in Washington did not immediately return messages seeking comments. Chinese authorities have previously rejected speculation about Covid’s origin as unhelpful and motivated by politics.
While the origin of the virus remains unknown, scientists believe that the most likely hypothesis is that it circulated in bats, like many coronavirus, before infected another species, probably puppies, civet cats or bamboo rats. On the other hand, the infection spread to people who handled or slaughtered these animals in a market in Wuhan, where the first human cases emerged in late November 2019.
However, some official investigations have raised the question of whether the virus fled a laboratory in Wuhan. Two years ago, a report from the Ministry of Energy concluded that a laboratory leakage was the most likely origin, although this report also expressed low confidence in the result.
That same year, then-FBI director Christopher Wray said his agency believed that the virus “most likely” spread after fled from a laboratory.
Ratcliffe, who served as director of National Intelligence during Trump’s first period, has said he is also in favor of the laboratory-leaking scenario.
“The laboratory leakage is the only theory supported by science, intelligence and common sense,” Ratcliffe said in 2023.
The CIA said it will continue to evaluate any new information that can change its assessment.
