Corona origin: CIA changes assessment and assumes laboratory theory

As one of his first actions in office, the new director of the US foreign intelligence service CIA, John Ratcliffe, changed his agency’s assessment of the origin of the coronavirus. This is now based on a laboratory breakdown.

“The CIA assesses with low confidence that a research-related origin of the Covid-19 pandemic is more likely than a natural origin based on available reports,” it said in a statement seen by US media. However, the CIA still considers the theory of a natural origin of the pandemic to be “plausible”. US President Donald Trump’s son, Don Jr., praised Ratcliffe’s decision on the X platform.

According to a US government official, the reassessment is based on a new analysis of already known intelligence findings, which was ordered under Ratcliffe’s predecessor William Burns and completed before Ratcliffe took office. The origin of the virus is still being investigated.

The former congressman from Texas worked as intelligence coordinator during Republican Trump’s first term in office – but only for around seven months. At the time, the Democrats accused Ratcliffe, among other things, of abusing his position for political purposes. He was sworn in on Thursday.

U.S. federal authorities, the World Health Organization (WHO), and scientists around the world have reached different conclusions about the origins of the coronavirus: Most of them believe that the virus spread from animals in China.

The CIA had previously taken the position that there was not enough information to assess whether the virus jumped from an animal to a human – or was caused by a glitch in a Chinese laboratory.

At the beginning of December, after a two-year investigation into the origins of the corona pandemic, a subcommittee of the US House of Representatives backed the theory of a laboratory accident in China in its final report. The SARS-CoV-2 virus “probably arose as a result of a laboratory or research accident,” said the 520-page report, which was based on 30 interviews and the review of more than a million pages of documents.

Trump, on the other hand, is convinced that the virus was caused by a glitch in a laboratory in the Chinese city of Wuhan. Ratcliffe had also advocated the laboratory theory in the past and accused Beijing of concealing the origin of the virus.

China has always rejected allegations of a possible laboratory accident.

The corona pandemic killed 1.1 million people in the USA alone. The coronavirus had spread from China to all over the world since the end of 2019 and, in addition to the high number of victims around the globe, brought lockdowns, travel restrictions and many other serious effects.