A view of Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China, on January 27, 2021. Several U.S. agencies have concluded the COVID-19 virus leaked from a lab thee. File photo by Roman Pilipey/EPA-EFE
Jan. 26 (UPI) -- The Central Intelligence Agency with a "low confidence" has changed its stance and concluded that it's likely the COVI-19 virus was leaked from a Chinese lab before it became a global pandemic five years ago.
"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 unnamed CIA spokesperson said in a statement Saturday. "CIA continues to assess that both research-related and natural origin scenarios of the COVID-19 pandemic remain plausible."
Previously, the CIA has said it was unclear whether the Covid pandemic emerged from human exposure to an infected animal or from a research lab in Wuhan, China.
A source familiar with the matter told NBC News the review was ordered in the closing weeks of the Biden administration and completed before President Donald Trump's inauguration Monday.
New CIA Director John Ratcliffe approved the declassification of the new assessment, the source said.
Ratcliffe told Breitbart News in an interview posted Friday: "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," Ratcliffe said. "That's a day-one thing for me.
He added: "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 FBI and the Energy Department have said it was likely the virus was the result of a lab leak.
New national security adviser Mike Waltz posted on X that so many "were right all along and labeled conspiracy theorists. We can't stop the next pandemic if we don't understand how the last one happened!"
A Republican-controlled congressional subcommittee released a report stating that "the weight of the evidence increasingly supports the lab leak hypothesis."
Former CDC Director Robert Redfield has been a proponent of the lab leak theory.
Anthony Fauci, the former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases chief, has said he believes that the virus crossed over naturally to humans from bats or another intermediate species, potentially at a seafood market in Wuhan in late 2019.