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The evaluation occurred after John Ratcliffe was confirmed as director of the CIA in Trump’s second mandate. Ratcliffe had promised to make the evaluation of the origins of COVID-19 a priority.
Some US agencies believe that the first cases COVID-19 in Wuhan, China, arose due to a laboratory leak. (Representative image)
The Central Intelligence Agency has changed its official position on the origin of COVID-19, saying on Saturday that the virus was “more likely” filtered from a Chinese laboratory that transmitted by animals.
The new evaluation occurred after John Ratcliffe was confirmed on Thursday as director of the CIA under the second administration of the White House of Donald Trump.
Ratcliffe, who served as National Intelligence Director of 2020-2021 during Trump’s first mandate, said in an interview published on Friday that a priority of the “first day” would be to make an evaluation over the origins of COVID.
“The agency is going to get out of the barrier,” Breitbart said, Ratcliffe, who believes that COVID-19 leaked from the Wuhan Virology Institute, at the right-wing.
“The CIA evaluates with little confidence that an origin related to the investigation of the COVID-19 pandemic is more likely that a natural origin based on the available report body,” said a CIA spokesman in a statement on Saturday.
The agency had not previously determined whether Covid had been unleashed by a laboratory or shedding setback from animals.
“The CIA continues to evaluate that the scenarios of natural origin related to the research and origin of the COVID-19 pandemic remain plausible,” said the spokesman.
An American official told AFP that the change was based on a new analysis of the existing intelligence ordered by the previous CIA director, William Burns, which was completed before the arrival of Ratcliffe this week.
Some US agencies, such as the Federal Research Office and the Department of Energy, support laboratory theory, although with different levels of trust, while most of the elements of the intelligence community are inclined towards natural origins.
The defenders of the laboratory can hypothesis highlight that the first cases of Covid-19 known arose in Wuhan, China, an important coronavirus research center, approximately 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) of the closest bat populations Virus similar to similar Sars.
(This story has not been edited by News18 staff and is published from a FEED – AFP union news agency)
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