The Department of Energy’s low-confidence assessment that Covid-19 most likely originated from a laboratory leak in China is still a minority view within the intelligence community, three sources familiar with the intelligence community’s findings tell CNN.
While the FBI has also assessed – with moderate confidence – the coronavirus that causes Covid-19 likely leaked from a lab, the majority of the intelligence community still believes that Covid either emerged naturally in the wild, or that there is still too little evidence to make a judgment one way or another.
Three sources told CNN that the Department of Energy’s shift was based in part on information about research being conducted at the Chinese Centers for Disease Control in Wuhan, China, which was studying a coronavirus variant around the time of the outbreak.
CNN has previously reported that the Chinese CDC lab in Wuhan was researching coronaviruses and bats, but it is unclear how closely related the variants being studied there were to SARS-CoV-2, the strain of the virus which spread around the world in 2020.
Other intelligence agencies, however, have disagreed that this data point was sufficient evidence to assess that the virus may have leaked from the lab, according to the sources.
A 2021 report issued by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence revealed that the National Intelligence Council, along with four other unidentified agencies, assessed with low confidence that the initial Covid-19 infection “was most likely caused by natural exposure to an animal infected with it or a close progenitor virus.”
Three other intelligence community agencies were “unable to coalesce around either explanation without additional information, with some analysts favoring natural origin, others a laboratory origin, and some seeing the hypotheses as equally likely.”…
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