Once dismissed as disinformation and a conspiracy theory by health experts, analysts at the CIA now believe the virus behind the COVID-19 pandemic more than likely began inside China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology.
CIA spokesmen, speaking on background, said the laboratory origin theory has eclipsed the idea that the bat-origin virus behind the pandemic jumped to humans from an infected wild animal. The change was adopted in the past several weeks.
“CIA assesses with low confidence that a research-related origin of the COVID-19 pandemic is more likely than a natural origin based on the available body of reporting,” the agency said in a statement. “CIA continues to assess that both research-related and natural origin scenarios of the COVID-19 pandemic remain plausible.”
The “low confidence” language of the statement was an apparent bid to deflect criticism of earlier inconclusive analysis in the face of Chinese stonewalling about what it knows about the early days of the virus. CIA analysts will continue to assess any new intelligence or open-source data that might change the new assessment, a spokesman said.
The latest shift by CIA analysts highlights other inaccurate assessments produced by the nation’s premier analytical spy service.
The agency joined the FBI and the Energy Department intelligence branches, which said that the Wuhan laboratory is the most likely source of the pandemic. The pandemic began in Wuhan around November 2019 and led to the deaths of an estimated 7 million people worldwide, including an estimated 1.2 million Americans.
Other U.S. intelligence agencies have said they lack the data to make a clear conclusion.
Emphasis on confidence levels in public intelligence pronouncements is a relatively new feature of intelligence agency public reports. For example, the CIA’s October 2002 intelligence assessment on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction programs offered no similar confidence levels for its conclusions about the programs.
That report stated that “Baghdad has biological and chemical weapons. … If left unchecked, it will probably have a nuclear weapon during this decade.”
That intelligence was a factor in the George W. Bush administration’s decision to launch the 2003 U.S.-led military invasion of Iraq, but scant evidence of chemical, biological or nuclear-related weapons was discovered by the invading troops.
The CIA also has come under fire more recently from House Republicans who say the agency covered up evidence of possible foreign government involvement in the mysterious brain injuries suffered by diplomats and intelligence personnel called Havana Syndrome.
The CIA believes it is “very unlikely” enemy agents were targeting Americans with directed energy arms. In recent public reports, no confidence level was mentioned for that conclusion by intelligence community analysts.
‘Scapegoating’
In Beijing, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning told reporters Monday that the new Trump administration was politicizing the COVID origin debate and that scientists should make any judgment on the source of the virus.
“It is ‘extremely unlikely’ that the pandemic was caused by a lab leak — this is the authoritative conclusion reached by the experts of the [World Health Organization]-China joint mission based on science following their field trips to the lab in Wuhan and in-depth communication with researchers,” she said. “The U.S. needs to stop politicizing and weaponizing origins-tracing at once and stop scapegoating others.”
The spokeswoman’s comments reflect Beijing’s new position. In the past, Chinese officials denied that the virus had come from the Wuhan Institute. Beijing accused the United States of sending the virus to China from a military laboratory, but Washington denied the claims.
President Trump, for years, has believed the pandemic originated from the Wuhan Institute.
“Some of the intelligence is classified, and I can’t talk about it, but common sense tells you it most likely — and when I say most likely, like 95% —came from the Wuhan lab,” Mr. Trump said in a 2021 interview with Sky News Australia. “I don’t know if they had bad thoughts or whether it was gross incompetence, but one way or the other it came out of Wuhan and it came from the Wuhan lab.”
A U.S. official said the new CIA assessment was not based on new intelligence and was completed before CIA Director John Ratcliffe took office last week.
Shortly after being sworn in, Mr. Ratcliffe criticized the CIA for failing to make a definitive conclusion on the virus’ origin.
“One of the things that I’ve talked about a lot is addressing the threat from China on a number of fronts, and that goes back to why a million Americans died and why the Central Intelligence Agency has been sitting on the sidelines for five years in not making an assessment about the origins of COVID,” Mr. Ratcliffe told Breitbart News. “That’s a Day 1 thing for me. I’ve been on record, as you know, in saying I think our intelligence, our science and our common sense all really dictate that the origins of COVID was a leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”
The CIA failed to make that assessment publicly, he said.
“So I’m going to focus on that and look at the intelligence and make sure that the public is aware that the agency is going to get off the sidelines.”
Seeking a stronger conclusion
White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan ordered the CIA review during the closing days of the Biden administration. Outgoing CIA Director William Burns then directed agency analysts to reach a stronger conclusion.
Until the new assessment, most intelligence analysts, including those at the CIA, had believed the laboratory leak origin theory and the wild animal origin were the two likely causes.
Many U.S. health agency officials, including former White House medical adviser Anthony Fauci, aggressively sought to dismiss the lab leak theory in public statements, arguing that a wild animal, possibly at a market in Wuhan, was the most likely origin of the virus known as SARS-CoV-2.
Senate Republicans have criticized Dr. Fauci for allegedly providing inaccurate information about the U.S. role in conducting gain-of-function research in China. Mr. Biden granted him a preemptive pardon shortly before leaving office.
Extensive United Nations and Chinese investigations of potential animal carriers of the virus, however, were never identified in Wuhan or in China. Earlier CIA assessments stated that more detailed intelligence was needed before reaching an authoritative virus origin assessment.
Congressional investigators have revealed that a group of American virologists took steps to play down the Wuhan laboratory source for COVID. The investigations also showed that federal funds were being used by EcoHealth Alliance, a New York-based research group, to fund risky virus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The Washington Times first disclosed in January 2020 that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was linked to Chinese military research and a potential source for the COVID outbreak. The story was falsely “fact-checked” by The Washington Post and USA Today newspapers, which dismissed the possible lab leak as a “conspiracy theory.” Both news outlets failed to publish corrections to those stories.
The CIA said the assessment was not changed by the new director or the arrival of a new administration.
The latest CIA assessment of the virus’s origin also calls into question additional conclusions about COVID contained in analyses by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Two ODNI assessments made public in recent years said the virus behind COVID was developed as a biological weapon and probably was not genetically engineered.
Those assessments said four U.S. intelligence agencies think the virus came from “natural exposure” to an infected animal. One agency thinks it was “laboratory-related,” and three others said they could not reach a conclusion.
Dany Shoham, a retired Israeli military intelligence expert on China’s biological arms, first disclosed to The Washington Times the links between the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the People’s Liberation Army.
“Since January 2020, a heavy, persistent, and yet unsophisticated disinformation endeavor has been conducted by China, aiming to wipe out the WIV lab-leak scenario,” Mr. Shoham said. “Astonishingly, this tainted effort was all along the way supported by the WHO, and — indirectly, since January 2021 — by the Biden administration, including major portions of the U.S. intelligence community; but the evidentiality of the WIV lab-leak scenario increasingly germinated, integrating scientific and intelligence arguments in conjunction.”
For more information, visit The Washington Times COVID-19 resource page.
• Bill Gertz can be reached at bgertz@washingtontimes.com.