The Central Intelligence Agency has officially changed its stance on how the covid-19 pandemic first began. In an assessment released over the weekend, the agency stated it now believes the coronavirus responsible for covid-19 most likely leaked out from a lab in Wuhan, China, rather than from direct animal-to-human transmission.
Newly enshrined CIA director John Ratcliffe declassified and released the findings of the assessment Saturday. While the CIA is now backing the often-called lab leak theory of covid-19’s origins, however, the agency stated that it only has a “low degree of confidence” in its conclusion. Furthermore, the agency has not ruled out the possibility that covid-19 may have emerged naturally.
“[The CIA] continues to assess that both research-related and natural origin scenarios of the Covid-19 pandemic remain plausible,” a CIA spokesperson said in a statement released Saturday.
China has fiercely rejected the CIA’s findings. “The conclusion that a laboratory leak is extremely unlikely was reached by the China-WHO joint expert team based on field visits to relevant laboratories in Wuhan,” foreign ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning said at a press conference held on Monday.
The debate over where covid-19 truly came from has been raging for years. In the conspiracy-laden parts of the internet, some people go so far as to argue that China deliberately designed and released covid-19 as a bioweapon. Another theory is that China (and perhaps the U.S.) turned a blind eye to dangerous virus research being conducted in Wuhan—research that eventually led to the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus escaping from the lab and infecting humans. In this scenario, the virus may have simply been collected from the wild and then leaked, or its progenitor may have been experimented on first and then turned into a virus that could easily infect humans.
China certainly hasn’t done itself any favors in warding off suspicions about its role in the pandemic. Its leadership limited information about covid-19 early on, silencing doctors who tried to warn others about the threat. And it has stymied efforts by outside groups, including the World Health Organization, to investigate the virus’ origins, even to this day. That said, either scenario would be embarrassing for the country given that China promised to improve its surveillance of emerging diseases in the wake of the 2002 epidemic of the original SARS virus, caused by animal-to-human transmission.
While there are notable scientists and health officials who back the lab leak theory (including President Donald Trump’s former head of the CDC, Robert Redfield), it doesn’t appear to be the majority opinion among relevant experts. A survey conducted last fall of virologists and epidemiologists in the field, for instance, found that most were in favor of a natural zoonotic origin (the virus spreading from animals to humans) for covid-19. Recent studies have also provided more suggestive evidence that the virus was likely circulating among animals that would have came into close contact with humans during the earliest days of the pandemic—a necessary step for zoonotic transmission, if not a bona-fide smoking gun for it.
The CIA’s new assessment began under the direction of former CIA director William Burns during the Biden administration. Critics argue that the findings were released to advance the politics of the agency’s new director, a longtime supporter of the lab leak theory. Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization (VIDO) at the University of Saskatchewan, notes that Ratcliffe and other intelligence officials crafted together a “fact sheet” that made the case for a lab leak during the last days of the first Trump administration. It’s a case littered with unsupported claims about the lab where the virus supposedly leaked from, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, she argues.
“The new assessment likely is a result of uncritically accepting the claims of this fact sheet as correct when there is no actual basis for doing so,” Rasmussen, who has herself conducted research looking into the origins of covid-19, told Gizmodo.
Importantly, the CIA admits that its shifted stance on covid-19’s origins was not driven by any major new intelligence. The FBI and the Energy Department have also backed the lab leak theory as the likely origin, but at least five other intelligence agencies as of late believe that a zoonotic origin is more likely. Given the low confidence in its own findings, the CIA’s new assessment is unlikely to sway anyone firmly in the zoonotic (i.e. animal transmission) camp. But Rasmussen believes the assessment will make it easier for the renewed Trump administration to accomplish its less than virtuous goals elsewhere.
“The ‘lab leak’ furthers political objectives of the Trump administration, including shutting down infectious disease and vaccine research, eliminating public health, eroding trust in science and scientists, and exacting retribution against perceived political opponents,” Rasmussen said. “It is in service of those goals this assessment was changed and is not a scientific change.”
