FBI Director Christopher Wray has acknowledged that the bureau believes the Covid-19 pandemic was likely the result of a lab accident in Wuhan, China.
In his first public comments on the FBI's investigation into the virus' origins during an interview with Fox News, Wray said that "the FBI has for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan."
His remarks fuel an ongoing divide in intelligence and medical circles over how the virus emerged, with a consensus still seemingly some way off.
Days before Wray's comments, the United States Department of Energy assessed with "low confidence" that a laboratory leak in China likely started the pandemic, according to a newly updated classified intelligence report.
A low confidence assessment generally means that the information obtained is not reliable enough or is too fragmented to make a more definitive analytic judgment or that there is not enough information available to draw a more robust conclusion.
A Department of Energy spokesperson told CNN in a statement: "The Department of Energy continues to support the thorough, careful, and objective work of our intelligence professionals in investigating the origins of Covid-19, as the President directed."
The Wall Street Journal first reported on the new assessment, which was conducted in light of new intelligence.
But the Department of Energy's low-confidence assessment that Covid-19 most likely originated from a laboratory leak in China is still a minority view within the intelligence community, three sources familiar with the intelligence community's findings told CNN. The majority of the intelligence community still believes that Covid either emerged naturally in the wild, or that there is still too little evidence to make a judgment one way or another.
More than three years after the first case of Covid-19 was detected in humans, there are still many unanswered questions about its origins.
There has long been a divide in the US government over whether the Covid-19 pandemic began in China in 2019 as the result of a lab leak, or whether it emerged naturally in animals before spreading to humans.
Advocates of the lab leak theory have long had to push against established scientific institutions, with many journals and experts declaring confidence that the virus had a natural origin.
A 2021 field mission between Chinese and World Health Organization experts also determined the lab leak theory to be "highly unlikely." But the mission was later criticized for a lack of transparency by Western governments.
China has repeatedly pushed back against any suggestions that a lab leak introduced the virus to its population. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said Wednesday that Wray's remarks and the theory hold "no credibility at all," given the "long and infamous history of fraud and deception" from the American intelligence community.
Experts have meanwhile urged restraint. National security adviser Jake Sullivan said on CNN's "State of the Union" on Sunday that the intelligence community remains divided on the matter. "Right now, there is not a definitive answer that has emerged from the intelligence community on this question."
"Some elements of the intelligence community have reached conclusions on one side, some on the other. A number of them have said they just don't have enough information to be sure," Sullivan added.
While the politics of the origins of Covid-19 remain extremely fraught, epidemiologists are stressing more fundamental concerns.
Dr. Megan Ranney, deputy dean of the School of Public Health at Brown University, told CNN: "While we're focusing on where Covid-19 started, we're not spending time [thinking] about how to keep America from ever having to go through the last three years again."
Comments
Post a Comment