This discovery is not based on new intelligence, and the report was carried out at the request of the Biden administration and former CIA Director William Burns.
It was declassified and made public on Saturday under the direction of President Donald Trump’s selection to lead the agency, John Ratcliffe, who officially assumed the role of director on Thursday.
Republican Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, who heads the Senate Intelligence Committee, expressed satisfaction on Saturday with the CIA’s determination in the final days of the Biden administration that the lab-leak theory is the most likely explanation. He also praised Ratcliffe for declassifying the assessment.
“Now, the most important thing is to make China pay for unleashing a plague on the world,” Cotton said in a statement.
China’s embassy in Washington did not immediately return messages seeking comment. Chinese authorities have in the past dismissed speculation about COVID’s origins as unhelpful and motivated by politics.
While the origin of the virus remains unknown, scientists think the most likely hypothesis is that it circulated in bats, like many coronaviruses, before infecting another species, probably racoon dogs, civet cats or bamboo rats. In turn, the infection spread to humans handling or butchering those animals at a market in Wuhan, where the first human cases appeared in late November 2019.
Some official investigations, however, have raised the the question of whether the virus escaped from a lab in Wuhan. Two years ago a report by the Energy Department concluded a lab leak was the most likely origin, though that report also expressed low confidence in the finding.
The same year then-FBI Director Christopher Wray said his agency believed the virus “most likely” spread after escaping from a lab.
Ratcliffe, who served as director of national intelligence during Trump’s first term, has said he favours the lab leak scenario, too.
“The lab leak is the only theory supported by science, intelligence, and common sense,” Ratcliffe said in 2023.
The CIA said it would continue to evaluate any new information that could change its assessment.
