by Washington (AP)-The CIA now believes that the virus responsible for the Covid 19 pandemic is most likely to come from a laboratory. This emerges from an assessment published on Saturday, which shows her finger in China, although she recognizes that the spy service “low trust” in China has its own conclusion.
The statement is not the result of new secret service information and the report was created at the behest of the bidue government and the former CIA director William Burns. The confidentiality was released and published on Saturday by order by John Ratcliffe, the head of the agency elected by President Donald Trump, who was sworn in as director on Thursday.
The differentiated result indicates that the authority assumes that the entirety of the evidence makes a laboratory jump more likely than a natural origin. However, the assessment of the agency has a low degree of trust, which indicates that the evidence is poor, not conclusive or contradictory.
Earlier reports on the origins of Covid-19 were shared, whether the Coronavirus may accidentally came from a Chinese laboratory or whether it was created naturally. The new assessment will probably not enclose the debate. In fact, intelligence officers say that the problem may never be solved due to a lack of cooperation on the part of the Chinese authorities.
The CIA “also estimates that both research-related and natural origin scenarios of Covid-19 pandemic remain plausible”, the agency wrote in a statement on its new assessment.
Instead of new evidence, the conclusion was based on new analyzes of information about the spread of the virus, its scientific properties as well as the work and conditions of the Chinese virology laboratories.
The legislator has put the American secret services under pressure to obtain more information about the origins of the virus, which has led to closures, economic unrest and millions of deaths. It is a question with considerable domestic and geopolitical effects, since the world continues to deal with the consequences of pandemic.
The Republican Senator Tom Cotton from Arkansas, chairman of the Senate’s secret service shot, said on Saturday that he was “pleased that the CIA has come to the conclusion in the last days of the bidue government that the laboratory leak theory is the most plausible explanation” , and he praised the assessment for the approval.
“The most important thing is to have China paid for that it has brought a plague across the world,” said Cotton in a statement.
The Chinese embassy in Washington did not immediately answer news with the request for comment. In the past, Chinese authorities have dismissed speculation about the origins of Covid as not very helpful and politically motivated.
While the origin of the virus is still unknown, scientists believe that the most likely hypothesis is that, like many coronaviruses, it circulated in bats before it infected a different kind, probably marten dogs, zibet cats or bamboo rats. In return, the infection spread to people who handled or slaughter these animals on a market in Wuhan, where the first human cases appeared at the end of November 2019.
However, some official investigations raised the question of whether the virus from a laboratory in Wuhan has escaped. Two years ago, a report by the Ministry of Energy came to the conclusion that a laboratory leak was the most likely cause, although this report also expressed little trust in the results.
In the same year, the then FBI director Christopher Wray said that his authority assumed that the virus had “most likely” spread out of a laboratory after the escape.
Ratcliffe, who acted as director of the National Secret Service during Trump’s first term, said he also supported the scenario of a laboratory leak.
“The laboratory leak is the only theory supported by science, intelligence and common sense,” said Ratcliffe in 2023.
The CIA said it would continue to evaluate all the new information that could change your assessment.
