The director of the FBI has said the bureau believes Covid-19 ‘most likely’ originated in a Wuhan laboratory.
Christopher Wray told Fox News: ‘The FBI has for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan.’
China pushed back on the suggestion once again on Tuesday, insisting it has been ‘open and transparent’ in the search for where the virus came from.
Mr Wray said he couldn’t share many details of the agency’s assessment because they were classified.
He accused the Chinese government of ‘doing its best to try to thwart and obfuscate’ efforts by the United States and others to learn more about the pandemic’s origins.
While some scientists are open to the lab-leak theory, others continue to believe the virus came from animals, mutated, and jumped into people — as has happened in the past with others.
Experts say the true origin of the pandemic may not be known for many years — if ever.
Mr Wray’s comments follow a Wall Street Journal report on Sunday that the US Energy Department (DOE) assessed with low confidence the pandemic resulted from an unintended lab leak in China.
Four other agencies, along with a national intelligence panel, still judge that the pandemic was likely the result of a natural transmission, and two are undecided, the Journal reported.
White House national security spokesman John Kirby said on Monday the US government has not reached a definitive conclusion and consensus on the pandemic’s origins.
‘There is not a consensus right now in the U.S. government about exactly how Covid started,’ he said. ‘There is just not an intelligence community consensus.’
China’s foreign ministry, asked to comment on the Wall Street Journal report, which was confirmed by other US media, referred to a WHO-China report that pointed toward a natural origin for the pandemic, rather than a lab leak.
Alina Chan, a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard, said she isn’t sure what new intelligence the agencies had, but ‘it’s reasonable to infer’ it relates to activities at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China.
She said a 2018 research proposal co-authored by scientists there and their US collaborators ‘essentially described a blueprint for Covid-like viruses’.
‘Less than two years later, such a virus was causing an outbreak in the city,’ she said.
The Wuhan institute had been studying coronaviruses for years, in part because of widespread concerns — tracing back to SARS — that coronaviruses could be the source of the next pandemic.
No intelligence agency has said they believe the coronavirus that caused Covid-19 was released intentionally.
The unclassified 2021 summary was clear on this point, saying: ‘We judge the virus was not developed as a biological weapon.’
Ms Chan, who co-authored a book about the search for Covid-19’s origins said: ‘Lab accidents happen at a surprising frequency. A lot of people don’t really hear about lab accidents because they’re not talked about publicly.’
Such accidents ‘underscore a need to make work with highly dangerous pathogens more transparent and more accountable’.
Last year, the WHO recommended a deeper probe into a possible lab accident. Ms Chan said she hopes the latest report sparks more investigation in the United States.
China has called the suggestion that Covid-19 came from a Chinese laboratory ‘baseless’.
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