The CIA expressed a “low confidence” assessment on Saturday that Covid-19 was developed in a laboratory.
“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 spokesman said in a statement.
Elected Democrats, many media outlets and some experts, including ex-National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci, for years dismissed the idea that Covid-19 developed in a lab as “conspiracy theory.” In a 2020 interview with National Geographic, Fauci said, “If you look at the evolution of the virus in bats and what’s out there now, [the scientific evidence] is very, very strongly leaning toward this could not have been artificially or deliberately manipulated … Everything about the stepwise evolution over time strongly indicates that [this virus] evolved in nature and then jumped species.”
The CIA assessment came two days after John Ratcliffe’s confirmation as the agency’s new director, and less than a month after a Wall Street Journal report indicating the Federal Bureau of Investigation made the same assessment as early as August 2021 — but that intelligence officials blocked the agency from delivering it to then-President Joe Biden.
Jason Bannan, a microbiology PhD and former senior scientist at the FBI, said the agency made its classification at the time with “moderate confidence.”
“Being the only agency that assessed that a laboratory origin was more likely, and the agency that expressed the highest level of confidence in its analysis of the source of the pandemic, we anticipated the FBI would be asked to attend” a briefing between Biden and intelligence officials, Bannan noted. Instead, then-National Intelligence Director Avril Haines “and a couple of her senior analysts” attended the meeting with Biden alone. Haines informed him that the National Intelligence Council concluded with “low confidence” that Covid-19 began with an animal before moving to a human.
President Donald Trump began asserting as early as April 2020 that Covid-19 had likely been developed by Chinese scientists. “Have you seen anything at this point that gives you a high degree of confidence that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was the origin of this virus?” a reporter asked Trump at a May, 1 2020 press briefing, prompting Trump to respond “Yes, I have.”
Trump’s comments at the time were derided by the media and various members of the scientific community.
You can watch Trump’s 2020 comments above.