Newly Declassified Biden-Era CIA Report Says COVID Lab Leak “Likely” – What Does That Mean?

It’s been five years since the first cases of COVID-19 began to be reported, and yet questions about where the virus came from still have not been answered to the complete satisfaction of global authorities. 

Two of the major competing theories center around the virus either having leaked from a research lab, or that it jumped from an animal species into humans, mostly likely via a wet market in Wuhan, China.

Other human coronaviruses are known to spread from animals into people. For example, humans generally catch the virus that causes Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) through contact with infected dromedary camels. 

For SARS-CoV-2, no definitive animal host has yet been identified. It’s thought that bats are a likely option, since they are known to carry similar coronaviruses. Proponents of the wet market theory suggest that an intermediate animal could have caught the virus from a bat and subsequently passed it on to humans. 

The specific market that was earmarked as the potential source of COVID-19 was the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, which sold a variety of exotic animals for food and as pets. A 2024 study took a fresh look at samples collected from the market by Chinese health authorities in 2020, and compared them with SARS-CoV-2 genomes from early COVID cases. They found evidence that a shortlist of potential intermediate host animals had been housed at stalls that also tested positive for the virus. These included raccoon dogs, masked palm civets, and hoary bamboo rats. 

“All the scientific data point one way – to SARS-CoV-2’s natural zoonotic origin in the Huanan market, Wuhan,” co-author Edward C. Holmes told New Scientist. 

The authors explain that their analysis “cannot conclusively identify which species may have shed SARS-CoV-2 in different samples from the Huanan market,” and they can’t be certain about the timings either, but other commentators at the time agreed that the evidence was strongly in favor of the wet market hypothesis.

“The work provides very strong evidence for wildlife stalls in the Hunan Seafood Market in Wuhan being a hotspot for the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic,” said infectious disease epidemiologist Professor James Wood, who was not part of the study team, in a comment to Science Media Centre. 

So why is the lab leak theory back in the news again?

The declassified report, and what it says

Because coronaviruses were a known threat to human health, scientists were already studying them way before COVID-19 emerged. Researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology were among them, sparking the idea that a modified coronavirus may have been accidentally leaked from the facility and begun infecting members of the community. 

It sounds like the beginning of a disaster movie, but such events can happen despite stringent biosecurity measures, so it’s not impossible.

In an exclusive interview with Breitbart News on Thursday, January 23, just after being sworn in as the new director of the CIA, John Ratcliffe said that getting to the bottom of the COVID origin story was a “day-one thing”. 

This has seemingly begun with Ratcliffe authorizing the declassifying of a report that was undertaken during the tenure of former CIA director William Burns. To be clear, this is not a new document, and it does not report any new intelligence or analysis.

The investigation’s conclusions are nuanced. As the Associated Press reports, the overarching finding is that, based on evidence collected by the CIA, a lab origin is considered more likely than a natural origin for the SARS-CoV-2 virus. However, the report is very clear that the agency itself has “low confidence” in its own findings, suggesting the evidence is far from conclusive.

Just as the scientific community has debated the various possibilities, the intelligence community has been divided on the question of where COVID came from. The New York Times points out that Ratcliffe has long been on the side of the lab leak theory. 

Ultimately, the newly declassified document doesn’t add much to the conversation. Key pieces of evidence that might more conclusively fall in favor of either side of the debate are still missing – there’s no clear evidence, for example, that any scientists in Wuhan were ever studying a virus that could have directly given rise to COVID-19.  

Chinese officials have also issued a statement strongly denying the lab leak theory. According to the Hong Kong Free Press, foreign ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning said that the US should “stop smearing and shifting the blame to other countries.”

We may never get to the bottom of exactly what started the COVID pandemic. Some experts told the New York Times that science, not intelligence, would likely provide any further conclusive evidence. But Ratcliffe made it clear that the CIA is not going to drop this investigation under his tenure. 

“One of the things that I’ve talked about a lot is addressing the threat from China on a number of fronts,” he told Breitbart News, “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.”