Last Updated: March 01, 2023, 09:54 IST
Washington, United States
FBI Director Christopher Wray said that the Chinese government has been trying to block investigative work into the origins of the coronavirus. (Reuters)
Christopher Wray accused the Chinese government of ‘doing its best to try to thwart and obfuscate’ efforts by the US and others to learn more about the pandemic’s origins
FBI Director Christopher Wray on Tuesday said the Covid-19 pandemic was likely caused by a leak from a laboratory in Wuhan, China.
“The FBI has for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan,” Christopher Wray told Fox News.
“Here you are talking about a potential leak from a Chinese government-controlled lab,” he added.
The comments come after a Wall Street Journal report said that the US Energy Department has assessed with low confidence the pandemic resulted from an unintended lab leak in China.
Four other agencies, along with a national intelligence panel, still judge that the pandemic was likely the result of a natural transmission and two are undecided, the report said.
He accused the Chinese government of “doing its best to try to thwart and obfuscate” efforts by the United States and others to learn more about the pandemic’s origins.
“I will just make the observation that the Chinese government, it seems to me, has been doing its best to try to thwart and obfuscate the work here, the work that we’re doing, the work that our U.S. government and close foreign partners are doing. And that’s unfortunate for everybody,” he added.
White House national security spokesman John Kirby said the US government has not reached a definitive conclusion and consensus on the pandemic’s origins.
China’s foreign ministry, asked to comment on the Wall Street Journal report, referred to a WHO-China report that pointed toward a natural origin for the pandemic, rather than a lab leak.
Wray said he couldn’t share many details of the agency’s assessment because they were classified.
In 2021, officials released an intelligence report summary that said four members of the US intelligence community believed with low confidence that the virus was first transmitted from an animal to a human, and a fifth believed with moderate confidence that the first human infection was linked to a lab.
Some scientists are open to the lab-leak theory, but many scientists believe the virus came from animals, mutated, and jumped into people — as has happened in the past with viruses. Experts say the true origin of the pandemic may not be known for many years — if ever.
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