The Central Intelligence Agency on Saturday said the COVID-19 pandemic was "more likely" to have emerged from a lab rather than from nature.
“CIA assesses with low confidence that a research-related origin of the COVID-19 pandemic is more likely than a natural origin based on the available body of reporting,” an agency spokesman said in a statement.
New CIA Director John Ratcliffe has long said he believes the virus most likely emerged from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
On Friday, a day after he was confirmed by the U.S. Senate, Ratcliffe said addressing COVID-19’s origins was a “day one priority for me.”
“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 told Breitbart.
“That’s a day-one thing for me. I’ve been on record as you know in saying I think our intelligence, our science, and our common sense all really dictates that the origins of COVID was a leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. But the CIA has not made that assessment or at least not made that assessment publicly. So, I’m going to focus on that and look at the intelligence and make sure that the public is aware that the agency is going to get off the sidelines.”
The agency had for years said it could not conclude whether COVID-19 was the result of a lab incident or it originated in nature. But in the final weeks of the Biden administration, former CIA Director William Burns asked CIA analysts and scientists to make a clear determination, stressing the pandemic's historical significance, according to a senior U.S. official.
It was unclear the extent to which the agency has collected new intelligence on COVID-19's origins and whether that new evidence was used to formulate the latest assessment.
Information from Reuters was used in this report.
Solange Reyner ✉
Solange Reyner is a writer and editor for Newsmax. She has more than 15 years in the journalism industry reporting and covering news, sports and politics.
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.