China lab leak Covid most likely, says FBI chief Christopher Wray

• The FBI believes Covid-19 most likely came from a lab run by the Chinese government.
• But judgements by other US government agencies diverge from those of the FBI.
• Joe Biden supports a whole-of-government effort to discover how Covid began.

The agency thinks Covid-19 most likely came from a lab run by the Chinese government, according to FBI Director Christopher Wray.

“The FBI has for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident,” he told Fox News.

It is the first time the FBI’s confidential assessment of how the pandemic virus arose has been confirmed in public.

There is no indication that it leaked from a lab, according to many scientists.

However, judgements reached by other US government agencies diverge from those of the FBI.

Some of them have asserted, though with questionable certainty, that the virus didn’t originate in a lab but rather spread from animals to people.

The US government as a whole has not reached a consensus on the origins, according to the White House.

The lab leak idea was deemed to be “very implausible” in a joint examination by China and the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2021.

However, the WHO investigation was deeply criticized and its director-general has since called for a new inquiry, saying: “All hypotheses remain open and require further study.”

A day prior to Mr. Wray’s remarks, the US ambassador to China urged China to “be more honest” regarding the origins of Covid.

According to Mr. Wray in his interview on Tuesday, China “has been trying its best to try to impede and distort” efforts to find the origin of the worldwide pandemic.

Although the FBI has a team of experts focusing on the dangers of biological threats, he claimed that specifics of the agency’s inquiry were classified.

Beijing retaliated by charging Washington of “political meddling”.

“The conclusions they have reached have no credibility to speak of,” said Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning.

According to certain investigations, the virus may have transfected humans in Wuhan, China, at the city’s seafood and wildlife market.

The Wuhan Institute of Virology, a top virus research facility that studied coronaviruses, is close to the market.

The virus was most likely caused by a lab breach in Wuhan, according to the US Department of Energy, which only reached that determination with “low confidence” a few days ago.

Several experts on the virus responded to that by stating this week that there is no fresh evidence supporting a lab leak.

According to Professor David Robertson, director of viral genomes and bioinformatics at the University of Glasgow, a natural genesis is still the more plausible option.

“There’s been an accumulation of evidence (what we know about the viruses biology, the close variants circulating in bats and locations of early human cases) that firmly points to a natural origin centered on the Huanan market in Wuhan city,” he said.

On Monday, White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said that US President Joe Biden supports “a whole-of-government effort” to discover how Covid began.

“We’re just not there [at consensus] yet,” he said. “If we have something that is ready to be briefed to the American people and the Congress, we will do that.”

With the latest spy balloon controversy, tensions between the US and China have increased.

This week, a bipartisan group of US legislators began a series of hearings on the “existential” danger posed by the Communist Party in power in China.

Human rights and the US economy’s reliance on Chinese manufacturing were major topics of discussion during the House Select Committee on Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party’s inaugural meeting.

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