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The Director of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Christopher Wray, has stated that the Covid-19 pandemic “most likely” originated in a “Chinese government-controlled lab” in Wuhan.
“The FBI has for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan,” Wray said in an interview with Fox News on Tuesday. You’re discussing a possible leak from a Chinese government-controlled lab.
“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 US government and close foreign partners are doing. And that’s unfortunate for everybody.”
He went to say that the FBI has specialists who focus on “the dangers of biological threats, which include things like novel viruses like Covid, and the concerns that they (are) in the wrong hands (of) some bad guys, a hostile nation state, a terrorist, a criminal”.
Previous research has suggested that the virus spread from animals to humans in Wuhan, possibly at the city’s seafood and wildlife market, according to the BBC.
The market is a 40-minute drive from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a world-class virus laboratory that conducted coronavirus research.
However, China has refuted the lab leak theory.
The FBI director also told Fox News that the Chinese government has been attempting to obstruct investigations into the origins of the coronavirus.
Wray’s remarks follow the US Department of Energy’s recent assessment that the Covid-19 pandemic was most likely caused by an unintentional lab leak in China.
The National Intelligence Council and four other government agencies have “low confidence” that Covid-19 was transmitted naturally from an infected animal, but the CIA and other government agencies are still undecided.
President Joe Biden, according to White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby, supports “a whole-of-government effort” to figure out how Covid got started.
However, he added that the US still lacks a clear consensus on what happened.
“We’re just not there yet. If we have something that is ready to be briefed to the American people and the Congress, we will do that,” the BBC quoted Kirby as saying.
Covid-19 first appeared in late 2019 and has since killed nearly seven million people worldwide.
Source:OCN
