FBI Director Christopher Wray has said that the bureau believes that Covid-19 “likely” originated in a lab controlled by the Chinese government.
“The FBI has assumed for a long time now that the origin of the pandemic was most likely a lab event,” he told JEE News.
This is the first public confirmation of the FBI’s classified decision on how the pandemic virus emerged.
China has denied the leak at the lab in Wuhan, calling the allegation defamatory.
Mr Ray’s comments came a day after the US ambassador to China called on the country to be “more honest” about the origins of Covid.
In his interview on Tuesday, Mr Ray said China was doing its best to “frustrate and obfuscate” efforts to identify the source of the global pandemic.
“And that’s unfortunate for everybody,” he said.
Some studies suggest the virus jumped from animals to humans in Wuhan, China, possibly at the city’s seafood and wildlife markets.
The market is a 40-minute drive from the world’s leading virus laboratory, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which conducted research on the coronavirus.
Other US government agencies have drawn different conclusions about the FBI, with varying degrees of confidence in their conclusions.
US media reported on Sunday that the US Department of Energy has estimated with “low confidence” that the Covid-19 leak came from a lab. The agency had previously said it had not determined how the virus started.
On Monday, White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said US President Joe Biden supports a “whole-of-government effort” to find out how Covid started.
But he added that there is still no clear consensus in the US about what happened.
“We’re not there yet,” he said. “If we have something that we’re willing to tell the American people and Congress, we’ll do that.”
An unclassified report released by a top US intelligence official in October 2021 said four US intelligence agencies estimated with “low confidence” that it originated from an infected animal or a related virus. has happened
For months, at the height of the pandemic, the lab leak hypothesis was widely dismissed as a conspiracy theory. Top health officials have publicly rejected the idea that the coronavirus could have been created in a lab before escaping.
A World Health Organization (WHO) investigation called the lab leak theory “highly improbable”, but after the investigation was heavily criticized, the agency’s director-general called for a new inquiry, saying: “All hypotheses are open.” and further study is needed.”
CoVID-19 first emerged in late 2019 and has since killed nearly 7 million people.
