The Central Intelligence Agency said Saturday that it’s more likely a lab leak caused the Covid-19 pandemic than an infected animal that spread the virus to people, changing the agency’s yearslong stance that it couldn’t conclude with certainty where the pandemic started.
The agency made its new assessment public two days after former Republican lawmaker John Ratcliffe was sworn in as its new leader.
“We have low confidence in this judgement and will continue to evaluate any available credible new intelligence reporting or open-source information that could change CIA’s assessment,” an unnamed CIA spokesperson wrote in an email sent to reporters Saturday.
The statement didn’t include any additional details about what led the agency to change its assessment and whether it had intelligence that would add weight to the theory that the virus had leaked from a research lab in Wuhan, China.
The “CIA continues to assess that both research-related and natural origin scenarios of the Covid-19 pandemic remain plausible,” the statement said.
A U.S. official granted anonymity to share private details about the assessment said former CIA director William Burns had told analysts that they needed to take a position on the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic, but that he was agnostic on potential theories.
A new CIA analysis of the intelligence it had on the virus’ origin was completed and published internally before Ratcliffe’s arrival, the U.S. official said. Ratcliffe authorized its public release, the official added.
Why it matters
Congressional Republicans have embraced the unproven lab leak theory, pointing to how the first cases of Covid-19 were reported in Wuhan, where a virology lab was researching coronaviruses at the time.
Still, many virologists have published studies supporting a likely natural origin, arguing that the virus may have spread amongst people who were exposed to animals infected with the virus that were being sold at a wet market in the city.
The intelligence community had been split on what sparked the pandemic, according to an unclassified assessment from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence published in 2023. More agencies at the time leaned toward a natural origin for the pandemic.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation has backed the lab leak hypothesis with moderate confidence, while the Department of Energy expressed low confidence in the theory.
Ratcliffe, who was the director of national intelligence during President Donald Trump’s first term, suggested at a Heritage Foundation event last summer that the CIA’s failure to come to a conclusion about the pandemic’s potential origin reflected “political and financial considerations” instead of the agency’s inability to do so.
Ratcliffe said at the same event that when he became national intelligence director in 2020 — at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic — he asked to see the evidence that had led the intelligence community to conclude a few days earlier that the virus had natural origins.
“The vast preponderance of it said exactly the opposite, said exactly what we’ve concluded, is that most likely, all of the intelligence that we had — circumstantial though it may be — pointed towards this being a research-related incident, not naturally occurring,” Ratcliffe said at the event.
Ratcliffe told Breibert in an interview Thursday that “why the Central Intelligence Agency has been sitting on the sidelines for five years in not making an assessment about the origins of Covid” was a day one priority for him.
The Chinese government has denied that the pandemic started due to a leak at the Wuhan lab.
Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said: “Now, the most important thing is to make China pay for unleashing a plague on the world.”
