FBI's New Embrace of COVID Lab Leak Theory Exposes Intel Community Rift

Despite the FBI's admission earlier this week that COVID-19 "most likely" emerged from a Chinese lab, some intelligence agents are pushing back.

The agency's leading theory, which FBI Director Christopher Wray confirmed to Fox News just days after a report by The Wall Street Journal, could shed new light on allegations leveled at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

But some members of the U.S. intelligence community have come to different conclusions about the virus' origins, Newsweek reported on Wednesday.

The outlet summarized one previous intelligence assessment, which showed that only one agency had "moderate confidence" the COVID-19 outbreak began from a laboratory-associated incident.

Four agencies, meanwhile, reportedly voiced "low confidence" that the virus emerged in the human population through exposure to an infected animal but refused to go further. Another three did not side with either theory.

"The intelligence community has over a dozen different agencies, and they all have their own process for looking at information and reaching a consensus within their agency," Rebecca Grant, a national security analyst at IRIS Research, told Newsweek.

"So it's common for the intel community to disagree on how confident they are on an assessment," she added.

Determining the most likely point of origin for the coronavirus remains a high priority for many scientists, lawmakers and public health officials, wherever that point might be, as all hope to head off future pandemics.

For two years, the consensus appeared to be that an intentional or unintentional laboratory origin of the virus was "extremely unlikely," a conclusion made in the World Health Organization's 2021 report.

However, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus hinted last year that the report was not definitive and that data was increasingly being held from scientists and investigators.

"In my discussions with the team, they expressed the difficulties they encountered in accessing raw data," Tedros said. "I expect future collaborative studies to include more timely and comprehensive data sharing."

Several congressional Republicans called for an investigation into the lab leak theory after the WSJ story broke, demanding that the Biden administration declassify all documents related to the virus' origins.

Information from Reuters was included in this report.