Beijing rejected the CIA’s findings that COVID-19 was likely leaked from a Chinese research laboratory.
“It is ‘extremely unlikely’ that the pandemic was caused by a lab leak — this is the authoritative conclusion reached by the experts of the WHO-China joint mission based on science following their field trips to the lab in Wuhan and in-depth communication with researchers,” Mao Ning, Beijing’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, said during a press briefing on Monday.
“The U.S. needs to stop politicizing and weaponizing origins-tracing at once and stop scapegoating others,” Mao continued.
The news comes after the CIA announced over the weekend that COVID-19 most likely originated from a leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in 2020. This news marked a change from the CIA’s prior position that the virus may have spread naturally from animals to humans due to unsanitary conditions at a local Wuhan meat market. The institute is located a short distance from the wet market where the first cluster of COVID-19 infections was reported.
When COVID-19 erupted during President Donald Trump’s first term in office, he said there was evidence that the virus had originated from the Wuhan lab. Critics blasted him for taking the position, calling him xenophobic.
Since COVID-19 broke out, U.S. intelligence agencies have investigated theories that the virus originated from the Wuhan lab. However, the intelligence community remains divided over whether the virus originated from the Wuhan lab or from the wet market.
However, federal agencies and lawmakers have increasingly given the lab leak argument validity.
In February 2023, the Department of Energy tentatively backed the lab leak theory after the FBI came to the same conclusion in 2021.
After a two-year investigation, the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic released a 520-page report in December 2024, concluding that COVID-19 was likely leaked from the Wuhan lab. It accused the lab of leaking the virus after using “dangerous” gain-of-function research paid for partly by funding from the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, led at the time by Dr. Anthony Fauci.
“The virus possesses a biological characteristic that is not found in nature,” the report read. “Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) researchers were sick with a COVID-like virus in the fall of 2019, months before COVID-19 was discovered at the wet market.”
The report further concluded that the World Health Organization, the U.N. agency tasked with overseeing global health, had overseen an inappropriate response to the pandemic “because it caved to pressure from the Chinese Communist Party and placed China’s political interests ahead of its international duties.”
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Trump took executive action to withdraw the United States from WHO on the day he took office, citing among his reasons for leaving the organization’s “mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic that arose out of Wuhan, China” and its “inability to demonstrate independence from the inappropriate political influence of WHO member states.”
When he halted funding to WHO in April 2020, Trump accused the organization of being “China-centric and claimed it had “pushed China’s misinformation” about the virus.