Former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe said Tuesday the theory that COVID-19 leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China is the “only” credible explanation for the pandemic that has claimed millions of lives around the world.
“My informed assessment as a person with as much access as anyone to our government’s intelligence … has been and continues to be that a lab leak is the only explanation credibly supported by our intelligence, by science and by common sense,” Ratcliffe told the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.
“If our intelligence and evidence supporting a lab leak was placed side by side with our intelligence and evidence pointing to a natural origins or spillover theory, the lab leak side of the ledger would be long, convincing, even overwhelming — while the spillover side would be nearly empty and tenuous,” added Ratcliffe, a former Texas Republican congressman who served as former President Donald Trump’s second and last director of national intelligence.
Since leaving government in 2021, Ratcliffe has repeatedly accused China’s ruling Communist Party of orchestrating a “massive cover-up” of its role in the pandemic.
That effort is ongoing, he said Tuesday, as the Chinese Embassy in Washington, DC formally objected to the subcommittee hearing and officials in China have gone to “great lengths” to obscure the truth.
The CCP’s tactics have ranged “from destroying medical tests, samples and data to intimidating and disappearing witnesses and journalists to lying and coercing global health authorities even spreading propaganda,” according to Ratcliffe.
The former intelligence chief said he and other Trump administration officials faced several “challenges” to relaying information about the lab leak theory to the public, including “legitimate concerns about our closely held sources and methods of intelligence, as well as illegitimate roadblocks that related to professional conflicts of interest and partisan politics.”
The former administration also faced “headwinds” form “conflicted scientists” and “mainstream press” who labeled talk about the lab leak a “conspiracy theory,” while at the same time it was “censored as disinformation by social media giants,” according to Ratcliffe.
“To this day, the CIA, unquestionably the world’s premier spy agency with an unrivaled capacity to acquire information, has continued to state that it does not have enough information to make any formal assessment,” he said.
“To put it bluntly, this is unjustifiable—and a reflection not that the agency can’t make an assessment with any confidence, but that it won’t.”
The reason, Ratcliffe claimed, is that the Biden administration does not want to “face head-on” the “enormous implications” of such an assessment — though President Biden signed a bill last month to declassify intelligence about the origins of COVID-19.
“Some three-and-a-half years later, the only plausible assessment the agency could make with any level of confidence is that a virus which killed over a million Americans originated in a Chinese lab whose research included work for the Chinese military,” he told lawmakers.
“And such an assessment would have enormous implications that I believe the current administration does not want to face head-on.”
The US Energy Department concluded in February that COVID-19 most likely leaked from a Chinese laboratory — more than a year after the FBI made a similar assessment.
Ratcliffe’s testimony comes weeks after former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield told the subcommittee that the truth of pandemic origins could only come from the intelligence community.