FBI Director Chris Wray said that the COVID-19 pandemic was "most likely" caused by a lab leak in Wuhan, China.
Wray's comment comes days after it was reported that the U.S. Energy Department had reached the same conclusion, albeit with "low confidence."
- Wray
did not share details about what evidence the FBI had gathered to reach
that conclusion, saying that much of the information is classified.
- He
said that the Chinese government had done "its best to try to thwart
and obfuscate" efforts by the U.S. and others to investigate the
pandemic's origins.
- White House national security spokesman
John Kirby said on Monday that the U.S. government had not yet reached a
definitive consensus on how the COVID-19 pandemic originated.
- According to a Wall Street Journal report,
four other government agencies, as well as a national intelligence
panel, previously concluded that the pandemic originated from a natural
transmission.
- Researchers have argued that the pandemic could have been caused by a lab leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which was conducting research on bat coronaviruses in 2019, something that Beijing strongly denies.
- Last month the WHO canceled plans for a second phase of its investigation into the origins of the pandemic.
- The first phase of the WHO investigation led to a March 2021 report outlining
four possible scenarios for the emergence of SARS-CoV-2, with the
bat-human transfer hypothesis being designated as the most likely one.
- The report said that it was "extremely unlikely" that a lab leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which was researching coronaviruses, was the source of the pandemic.
- Dominic
Dwyer, a virologist who served on the WHO team, said that the inclusion
of the "lab leak" hypothesis in the final report was opposed by Chinese
researchers and authorities.
