Several studies have said the virus originated naturally — but U.S. intelligence changed its assessment over the weekend.
A top Chinese official on Monday denied suggestions from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency that the Covid-19 pandemic was triggered by the virus leaking from a lab.
“The conclusion that a laboratory leak is extremely unlikely was reached by the joint China–WHO expert team based on field visits to relevant laboratories in Wuhan,” said Mao Ning, Beijing’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson, at a press briefing, according to news agency AFP.
Mao added that “this has been widely recognized by the international community and the scientific community.” Several studies have said that the virus originated naturally, arguing it may have spread among people who were exposed to infected animals sold at a wet market in the Chinese city of Wuhan.
But officials in Washington have harbored suspicions that the virus may have originated in a lab, before leaking out to the general population and causing a pandemic that killed millions of people and sent much of the world into harsh lockdowns in 2020 and 2021.
Over the weekend, the CIA issued a new public assessment about Covid just two days after former Republican lawmaker John Ratcliffe was sworn in as its new director, in the new American administration under President Donald Trump.
“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 agency spokesperson wrote to reporters on Saturday.
The statement didn’t include details about what led the CIA to change its assessment and whether it had intelligence that would bolster the theory that the virus 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.
