Covid: FBI chief Christopher Wray says China lab leak ‘most likely’

BBC News:

FBI Director Christopher Wray has said that the bureau believes Covid-19 “most likely” originated in a “Chinese government-controlled lab”.

“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 public confirmation of the FBI’s classified judgement of how the pandemic virus emerged.

China has denied a lab leak in Wuhan, calling the allegation defamatory.

Mr Wray’s comments come a day after the US ambassador to China called for the country to “be more honest” about Covid’s origins.

In his interview on Tuesday, Mr Wray said China “has been doing its best to try to thwart and obfuscate” efforts to identify the source of the global pandemic.

“And that’s unfortunate for everybody,” he said.

Some studies suggest the virus made the leap from animals to humans in Wuhan, China, possibly at the city’s seafood and wildlife market.

The market is a 40-minute drive from a world-leading virus laboratory, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which conducted research into coronaviruses.

Other US government agencies have drawn differing conclusions to the FBI’s, with varying degrees of confidence in their findings.

The Chinese government has not yet responded to Mr Wray’s comments. However on Monday, it dismissed media reports that the US energy department had assessed with “low confidence” that Covid leaked from a lab. The agency had formerly said it was undecided on how the virus began.

Beijing also alluded to a 2021 World Health Organization (WHO) investigation that called the lab leak theory “extremely unlikely”.

“Certain parties should stop rehashing the ‘lab leak’ narrative, stop smearing China and stop politicising origins-tracing,” said foreign ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning.

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