CIA believes Covid-19 likely caused by lab leak, NBC News reports

The CIA has shifted its stance about the origin of the virus that causes Covid-19, NBC News reported on Saturday. The intelligence agency now believes that the coronavirus escaped from a Chinese lab, a shift from its previous stance, in which it did not take a position.

“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,” a CIA spokesperson said in a statement to NBC News.

“CIA continues to assess that both research-related and natural origin scenarios of the COVID-19 pandemic remain plausible.”

The move comes one day after John Radcliffe, the new director of the CIA, was confirmed. He said on Friday in an interview that he believes U.S. intelligence and science points to the origin of Covid being an accidental release, or “lab leak,” from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a research institution in Wuhan, China, where the outbreak was first observed in late 2019.

The question of how Covid-19 emerged in humans is fraught.

Some, including former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases chief Anthony Fauci, believe that the virus crossed over naturally to humans from bats or another intermediate species, potentially at a seafood market in Wuhan in late 2019.

Others, including many in the Trump administration and staff for the House Committee for Government Oversight and Reform, believe it escaped from research activities in the region, citing the location of the outbreak, as well as U.S. funding documents describing the work at WIV on similar viruses.

China denies a laboratory origin. The New York Times, which first reported the CIA’s shift, says that the CIA believes that Chinese leadership doesn’t know and doesn’t want to know the origin of the virus. The origin has significant implications for international relations with China, public health, and the future of virus research.

In 2021, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees the CIA and 16 other federal intelligence agencies, released a report on the origins of Covid-19.

It said that four IC agencies believe with low confidence that the first infection was caused by natural exposure to an infected animal. It added that one element, identified by the Times as the FBI, believes it was the result of a laboratory incident related to experimentation or animal sampling or handling, with medium confidence.

Three agencies at the time said that they were unsure either way. Last year, one of those agencies on the fence, the Energy Department, said that it now favored a laboratory origin with low confidence. The agency believes that the spillover could be related to research activities at the Wuhan Center for Disease Control, a separate institution from WIV, according to the Times.

The CIA was also unsure at the time of the initial report, but with Saturday’s shift it now favors a laboratory origin. The new assessment, a source told NBC News, isn’t based on new information, but rather on a review of existing information. The review started in the closing weeks of the Biden administration and was completed before Trump took office, according to NBC News.

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