The CIA has today revealed its belief that COVID-19 was likely leaked from a Chinese lab after years of denial under the Biden administration.
A spokesperson for the agency said on Saturday that they now favor the lab theory.
Officials said that there is no new evidence behind their shift in opinion - it is based on the same evidence they have been mulling over for months.
'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.
'CIA continues to assess that both research-related and natural origin scenarios of the COVID-19 pandemic remain plausible,' the agency said in an announcement on Saturday.
The spokesperson added that they have 'low confidence in the judgement' and would continue to evaluate any new intelligence or relevant information.
In announcing their shift in stance, the CIA joined the FBI and the Energy Department in identifying the cause of it as being a lab mishap in Wuhan, China.
The Wuhan Institute of Virology has faced scrutiny over its research into bat coronaviruses and alleged lapses in security around the time the pandemic started.
Under Biden and COVID czar Anthony Fauci, the government was adamant that the lab notion was nothing more than a conspiracy theory.
John Ratcliffe, Trump's newly sworn-in CIA director, has long been convinced that the virus came from a lab.
Ratcliffe testified before the House Select Subcommittee in 2023 that he didn't feel agencies were being fully truthful when it came to the origins of the virus.
Speaking then, he said that he and other Trump officials had encountered 'illegitimate roadblocks' when looking into the cause of it.
In an interview with Breitbart following his confirmation by the Senate on Friday, Ratcliffe said one of his first priorities was getting his agency to make a public assessment on the pandemic's origins.
He said: '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.
'That´s a day-one 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.'
Former CIA Director William Burns had told analysts that the agency should express an opinion rather than remain neutral, but didn't express a preference, a source told
NBC.
Researchers from
Australia and Arizona last year published analysis saying that the lab leak was the most likely leaked from a lab.
They used a risk analysis tool to determine the chances the virus was of a 'unnatural' or 'natural' origin.
The team compared the characteristics of the virus and the pandemic to 11 criteria that analyzed things like the rarity of a virus, the timing of a pandemic, the population infected, the spread of a virus and the unexpected symptoms of a virus.
Based on the nature of Covid, researchers assigned a score to each category - less than 50 percent meant the pandemic would be classified as a natural outbreak, but 50 or more percent would mean the pandemic was an unnatural outbreak. Covid received a score of 68 percent.
Since the pandemic started in late 2019 over 1.2 million American have died, with over seven million people across the globe.
China has frequently accused the US of trying to 'smear' Beijing with with it calls false claims about the origins of the virus.
