The CIA now leans towards lab leak theory for COVID origins

Republican senator Tom Cotton, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said on Saturday he was “pleased the CIA concluded in the final days of the Biden administration that the lab-leak theory is the most plausible explanation”, and commended Ratcliffe for declassifying the assessment.

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“Now, the most important thing is to make China pay for unleashing a plague on the world,” Cotton said in a statement.

China’s embassy in Washington did not immediately return messages seeking comment. Chinese authorities have in the past dismissed speculation about COVID’s origins as unhelpful and motivated by politics.

While the origin of the virus remains unknown, scientists think the most likely hypothesis is that it circulated in bats, like many coronaviruses, before infecting another species, probably racoon dogs, civet cats or bamboo rats.

The infection then spread to humans butchering those animals at a market in Wuhan, China, where the first human cases appeared in late November 2019.

Some official investigations have questioned whether the virus escaped from a lab in Wuhan. Two years ago, a report by the Energy Department concluded a lab leak was the most likely origin, though that report also expressed low confidence in the finding.

The same year, then-FBI Director Christopher Wray said his agency believed the virus “most likely” spread after escaping from a lab.

Ratcliffe, who was director of national intelligence during Trump’s first term, has said he favours the lab leak scenario.

“The lab leak is the only theory supported by science, intelligence, and common sense,” Ratcliffe said in 2023.

The document was released as China’s veteran foreign minister issued a veiled warning to America’s new secretary of state.

China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi conveyed the message in a phone call on Friday, their first conversation since Marco Rubio’s confirmation as Trump’s top diplomat four days earlier.

“I hope you will act accordingly,” Wang told Rubio, according to a Foreign Ministry statement, employing a Chinese phrase typically used by a teacher or a boss warning a student or employee to behave and be responsible for their actions.

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The short phrase seemed aimed at Rubio’s vocal criticism of China when he was a US senator, prompting the Chinese government to put sanctions on him twice in 2020.

It can be translated in various ways — in the past, the Foreign Ministry has used “make the right choice” and “be very prudent about what they say or do” rather than “act accordingly.”

Rubio, during his confirmation hearing, cited the importance of referring to the original Chinese to understand the words of China’s leader Xi Jinping.

“Don’t read the English translation that they put out because the English translation is never right,” he said.

A US statement on the phone call didn’t mention the phrase. It said Rubio told Wang that the Trump administration would advance US interests in its relationship with China and expressed “serious concern over China’s coercive actions against Taiwan and in the South China Sea”.