The FBI believes Covid “most likely” originated in a laboratory in China, its director has said.
Christopher Wray said the agency “has for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan.”
It is the first public confirmation of the FBI’s classified judgement of how the pandemic virus emerged.
He said that the assessment was based on research the agency’s analysts, including scientists, had conducted and that “our work related to this continues”.
He accused the Chinese government of “doing its best to try to thwart and obfuscate” efforts by the United States and others to learn more about the pandemic’s origins in an interview with Fox News.
China has denied a lab leak in Wuhan. It has referred to a WHO-China report in 2021 that pointed toward a natural origin for the pandemic, rather than a lab leak.
Some studies suggest the virus made the leap from animals to humans in Wuhan possibly at the city’s seafood and wildlife market.
The market is a 40-minute drive from a world-leading virus laboratory, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which conducted research into coronaviruses.
Mr Wray’s comments contrast with a Wall Street Journal report on Sunday that the US Energy Department has assessed with low confidence the pandemic resulted from an unintended lab leak in China.
Four other agencies, along with a national intelligence panel, still judge that the pandemic was likely the result of a natural transmission, and two are undecided, the Journal reported.
On Monday, White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said that US President Joe Biden supports “a whole-of-government effort” to discover how Covid began.
But he added that the US still lacks a clear consensus as to what happened.
