The new CIA Director John Ratcliffe, taking the oath, said that the study of the source of Covid is the priority of the " And now the CIA supports the theory of the laboratory origin of the virus. The CIA has previously said for years that it does not have enough information to conclude whether the COVID-19 pandemic originated naturally at a wildlife market in Wuhan, or through an accidental leak from a research laboratory.. This is written by Ny Times.

Last week, the agency published a new assessment in which analysts said that now they prefer the theory of leakage from the laboratory.

The representative of the agency stated that this change is based on the "

John Ratcliffe, the new Director of the CIA, for a long time supported the hypothesis of leakage from the laboratory.

He said this was critical intelligence that needed to be understood and would have implications for US-China relations..

The announcement of the shift comes shortly after Ratcliffe said in an interview that he no longer wants the agency to remain " Ratcliffe has long said he believes the virus most likely originated at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

In the last weeks of the administration of the Joe Biden administration, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan ordered a new secret analysis of the origin of the pandemic.

Officials said that the agency is not going to change its position in favor of the new leader, and that a new assessment has been developed for some time.

Even in the absence of a solid intelligence hypothesis about the leak in the laboratory, it is gaining strength inside intelligence agencies. However, some analysts doubt the advisability of changing the position in the absence of new information.

The previous director of the CIA agency William Burns told analysts that they need to take a certain position regarding the origin of the Covid-19, although he is not even sure what theory they should accept. This was reported by a senior US intelligence official..

Another high -ranking American official said that John Ratcliffe made the decision to declassify and publish a new analysis.

Ratcliffe raised questions about politicization in intelligence agencies. John Ratcliffe, who was director of national intelligence in Donald Trump's first administration, argued in an essay for Fox News in 2023 that the CIA was reluctant to accept the lab leak to avoid geopolitical problems for the Joe Biden administration.

“The real problem is that the only assessment the agency could make—namely, that the virus that has killed more than a million Americans originated in a CCP-controlled laboratory whose research included work for the Chinese military—has enormous geopolitical consequences that the administration.

No new intelligence on the change of agency is worth. Rather, it is based on the same evidence that it has studied within a few months. However, the analysis is based in part on a closer look at conditions in high-security laboratories in the Chinese province of Wuhan before the outbreak of the pandemic.

Officials say there are strong logical arguments for both the lab leak theory and the natural cause theory, but there is simply no conclusive data on the matter..

The five-year anniversary of the 76-day quarantine in Jun was January 23, 2025. , the origins of COVID-19 remain unclear, with the World Health Organization (WHO) continuing to call on China to provide more data while Beijing insists it has disclosed all available information.

Life in the city of more than 11 million people has largely returned to normal, but memories of the pandemic linger for many residents, who recall the uncertainty of the early days, food shortages and the struggle for hospital beds.

The debate about the origin of Covid-19 continues: some scientists suspect the transfer from the animal to a person, while others indicate a possible incident related to the laboratory.

To confirm the natural origin theory, intelligence officials would like to find the animal that transmitted the virus to humans, or find the bat that carries the likely ancestor of the coronavirus that causes COVID-19.

Likewise, to close the lab leak, the intelligence community would like to find evidence that one of the Wuhan labs was working on the precursor virus that directly led to the epidemic.. No evidence was discovered.

Let us remind you that in 2021 there were even four theories about the origin of coronavirus. And the head of the mission to investigate the origins of the coronavirus of the World Health Organization, Ben Embarek, stated that the probable “patient zero” of the disease could be a laboratory employee in Wuhan, China, who became infected from a bat.