CIA admits COVID-19 most likely originated from Chinese lab leak

The change comes shortly after CIA Director John Ratcliffe was sworn into his new position, vowing to investigate the origins of the virus.

The agency announced its changed position in a statement, obtained by the Wall Street Journal and New York Times.

“CIA assesses with low confidence that a research-related origin of the COVID-19 pandemic is more likely than a natural origin based on the available body of reporting,” an agency spokesman said.

On the judgment being “low confidence,” the CIA said it would continue to evaluate “any available credible new intelligence reporting or open-source information that could change CIA’s assessment.”

The change brought the CIA into line with the predominant views of the FBI and the Energy Department.

However, the issue still divides the U.S. and international intelligence community. China has refused to cooperate with investigators, making a definitive conclusion difficult. Four other U.S. intelligence agencies assessed, with low confidence, that the virus originated from an animal that leaped to a human.

The CIA’s move drew praise from some watchdog groups, including the White Coat Waste Project.

“Under new management, the CIA is finally saying the quiet part out loud: a Fauci-funded animal lab in Wuhan probably caused COVID. As the group that first exposed and prompted Donald Trump to end Fauci’s reckless funding for gain-of-function animal tests in Wuhan that violated federal policy, likely infected COVID Patient Zero, and sparked a pandemic, we applaud the President and CIA Director Ratcliffe for getting out the truth about how a taxpayer-funded animal lab in China killed a million Americans,” Justin Goodman, Senior Vice President of the group, said in a statement.

In July, a nonpartisan committee of former government officials and scientists, organized by the conservative Heritage Foundation, released a 64-page report, boasting 228 footnotes, identifying a lab leak as the most likely source of the virus.

It recommended taking actions that would hold Beijing accountable.

Ratcliffe pledged in a Friday interview with Breitbart News that investigating the origin of the virus would be one of his top priorities.

“One of the things that I’ve talked about a lot is addressing the threat from China on a number of fronts, and that goes back to why a million Americans died and why the Central Intelligence Agency has been sitting on the sidelines for five years in not making an assessment about the origins of COVID,” he told the outlet.

“That’s a day-one thing for me. I’ve been on record as you know in saying I think our intelligence, our science, and our common sense all really dictates that the origins of COVID was a leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. But the CIA has not made that assessment or at least not made that assessment publicly. So I’m going to focus on that and look at the intelligence and make sure that the public is aware that the agency is going to get off the sidelines,” Ratcliffe continued.

The COVID-19 pandemic caused millions of deaths worldwide, 1.2 million in the U.S. alone, and cost tens of trillions of dollars in damages.

See more here washingtonexaminer.com

Header image: The Truman Library

Editor’s note: Leading experts at Principia Scientific dispute there was a deadly coronavirus pandemic. Instead, it is our widely considered view that COVID19 was the rebranding of seasonal influenza. As such, this ‘lab leak’ narrative may be judged as a ruse.

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