New York: The top US intelligence agency the CIA claimed that the COVID-19 pandemic ‘more likely’ came from a laboratory leak, Al Jazeera reported.
Following the initial outbreak in China’s Wuhan, the contagious disease caused by the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 spread worldwide in 2020, resulting in the COVID-19 pandemic.
Back then, President Donald J. Trump called it “the Chinese virus,” in his tweets leading to straining relations with China.
The CIA’s claim about the COVID-19 comes after John Ratcliffe took over as director of the top intelligence agency.
A spokesperson for the US agency reportedly said that the ‘CIA continues to assess that both research-related and natural origin scenarios of the COVID-19 pandemic remain plausible’.
Adding further, the official said that ‘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.’
It is reported citing US media that the assessment, made based on existing intelligence, not new information, began when President Joe Biden was in power and got completed before Ratcliffe took over.
On the heels of the CIA’s announcement, the other US agencies including the FBI and the Department of Energy openly backed the theory that COVID-19 may have originated from a lab in Chinas’ Wuhan.
China’s embassy in Washington responded to the CIA’s charges terming it ‘concocts misleading conclusions’, adding that scientists and experts should find answer for the source of virus through ‘meticulous’ scientific research ‘rather than being judged by politicians.’
Embassy spokesperson Liu Pengyu ‘firmly’ opposed ‘the politicization and stigmatization of the source of the virus’, alongside urging everyone to ‘stay away from conspiracy theories’.