China has strongly rejected the CIA’s claims that the Covid-19 pandemic may have been caused by a virus leak from a laboratory.
Mao Ning, spokesperson for China’s Foreign Ministry, stated on Monday that the idea of a laboratory leak is “extremely unlikely” based on findings from the joint China-WHO expert team, which conducted on-site visits to relevant laboratories in Wuhan.
Mao emphasized that this conclusion has been widely accepted by both the international and scientific communities. Multiple studies have pointed to a natural origin for the virus, suggesting it may have spread through contact with infected animals sold at a wet market in Wuhan.
However, U.S. officials have long questioned whether the virus might have emerged from a lab before leaking into the general population, leading to a global pandemic that caused millions of deaths and severe lockdowns in 2020 and 2021.
Over the weekend, the CIA issued a new public assessment, just days after John Ratcliffe, a former Republican lawmaker, became the agency’s new director under President Donald Trump’s administration. In its statement, the CIA expressed “low confidence” in the laboratory leak theory, but also noted that both the lab-leak and natural origin scenarios remain plausible. The agency did not provide details on what influenced this shift in assessment or whether it had uncovered new intelligence supporting the lab-leak theory.
