A Federal Bureau of Investigation says the new coronavirus “most likely” originated in a “Chinese government-controlled laboratory.”
“The FBI has assessed for quite some time that the origin of the pandemic was most likely a potential laboratory accident,” FBI Director Christopher Wray said in an interview with Fox News. This is the first public confirmation of the FBI’s classified assessment of how it originated. the pandemic virus..
A day ago, a White House spokesman said that the United States is still investigating the question of the origin of the virus that led to the pandemic.
Christoph Ray says China is “doing everything it can to try to thwart and obfuscate” efforts to identify the source of the global pandemic and “that’s unfortunate for everyone”.
Some studies have so far shown that the virus jumped from its spread among animals to humans in Wuhan. It is believed to have happened at the seafood and wildlife market in the city, which is just a 40-minute drive from the secret Chinese laboratory in Wuhan.
Two days ago, China again dismissed media reports of a possible laboratory origin of the virus and recalled a 2021 World Health Organization investigation that called the laboratory leak theory “extremely unlikely.”
“Some countries should stop repeating the ‘lab leak’ narrative, stop vilifying China and stop politicizing tracing the origin (of the virus),” Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning was quoted as saying by the BBC.
The WHO investigation was heavily criticized and the UN health agency’s director-general has since called for a new investigation, insisting that “all hypotheses remain open and require further investigation”.
Earlier this week, the US Department of Energy, which runs the government’s laboratories, announced that the coronavirus was man-made.
An unclassified report published by a senior US intelligence official in October 2021 supports this information. Four US intelligence agencies have declared that the likelihood of the virus coming from an infected animal is highly unlikely.
On Tuesday, a bipartisan panel of US lawmakers began a series of hearings on the “existential” threat posed by the ruling Chinese Communist Party. The first session of the House Select Committee on Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party focused on issues such as human rights and the dependence of the American economy on Chinese manufacturing, writes BBC.
