Since COVID-19 first took off, political leaders, infectious disease specialists, and the lay public have debated its origins. Eventually, two hypotheses emerged: Either the virus crossed over from animals to humans in a wet market in Wuhan—the city in which the disease first appeared—or it leaked from a Chinese lab, likely the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
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The truth is still unknown. But on Jan. 25, 2025, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) weighed in, saying in a statement to reporters that the virus is “more likely” to have come from a lab than a natural reservoir like a bat or other animal at the wet market. The conclusion did not come from new evidence—merely a fresh look at existing data—and the agency has “low confidence” in the findings, suggesting the analysis is based on incomplete data. Accordingly, the CIA said it would “continue to evaluate any available credible new intelligence reporting or open source information that could change CIA’s assessment.”
Such hedging notwithstanding, the announcement came as a thunderclap to China, which has long insisted that the Wuhan lab was not responsible. In response to the CIA’s new determination, the Chinese government doubled down on that position. “Origins-tracing is a matter of science and any judgement on it should be made in a science-based spirit and by scientists. It is extremely unlikely that the pandemic was caused by a lab leak,” said foreign ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning at a press conference. “The U.S. needs to stop politicizing and weaponizing origins-tracing at once, and stop scapegoating others.”
The political backdrop
Only one day before the CIA’s statement, the agency’s just-sworn-in director, John Ratcliffe, signalled that a new position on the origins of COVID-19 was coming. “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,” he said in an interview with Breitbart News. “That’s a day-one thing for me.”
That confrontational approach to Beijing is a consistent one for Ratcliffe, who served as Director of National Intelligence during President Donald Trump’s first term. “The lab leak is the only theory supported by science, intelligence, and common sense,” he said in 2023.
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The newly announced position stretches across political lines. The finding was reached during the final days of the Biden administration, under then-CIA chief William Burns, according to reporting by the New York Times, and Ratcliffe ordered it declassified and released.
A hotly debated question since the start
Early in the pandemic, back in 2021, the World Health Organization reached a different conclusion. In collaboration with Chinese epidemiologists,they conducted an extensive review of the likely origins of the COVID-19 virus and saw a natural spillover from an animal host to humans as the likeliest route. A contamination of the food-supply cold chain—with the virus hitching a ride in refrigerated food somewhere in the production and delivery line—was also considered. The lab theory did not gain much traction. “Introduction through a laboratory incident was considered to be an extremely unlikely pathway,” the report concluded.
Mao Ning, the foreign ministry spokeswoman, cited that finding at her Jan. 27 press conference, describing it as an “authoritative conclusion reached by the experts of the WHO-China joint mission based on science following their field trips to the lab in Wuhan and in-depth communication with researchers.”
But this was hardly the last word. Scientists from the U.S. and elsewhere had no role in that study, and the research occurred while the pandemic was still boiling, with a lot about the virus still unknown. In 2023, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) reached a conclusion similar to the CIA’s new one: that a lab leak was responsible for the pandemic, though it could also say so only with “low confidence.” That same year, former FBI Director Christopher Wray echoed the DOE’s conclusion, if somewhat more confidently, telling Fox News, “The FBI has for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan.”
The Chinese foreign ministry hit back then too. “By rehashing the lab-leak theory,” said Mao Ning, “the U.S. will not succeed in discrediting China, and instead, it will only hurt its own credibility.”
Widespread disagreement
The problem for the lab-leak position is that the U.S. has never had access to the Wuhan lab and has thus been unable to reach a definitive answer for more than five years. Now that the CIA has at last come to a conclusion, not all scientists are sold on what it has reported, seeing the results as thinly scientifically sourced.
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“We have at least a half-dozen scientific papers in the best scientific journals, including Cell and Science, which convincingly demonstrate how the SARS-2 virus emerged through zoonotic spillover,” said Dr. Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at the Baylor College of Medicine, in an email to TIME. “In contrast, I’ve not seen a single published scientific paper on lab leak…nor even a serious scientific explanation [of] how that would occur given the scientific evidence to date. So I don’t understand how the CIA came to its conclusions.”
The debate is more than an academic one. If the virus indeed spilled over in a Wuhan wet market, the resulting seven million deaths worldwide make a strong case for better regulating the way we interact with the ecosystem, such as in outdoor food bazaars. If, instead, the pandemic was the result of what went on in a laboratory, then China, the U.S., and any other country that performs such biological tinkering are gravely in need of more oversight to make these labs safer.
As scientists have argued for years, both precautions are necessary—no matter how COVID-19 originated.
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