CNN: The U.S. Department of Energy Assesses that Covid-19 Likely Resulted from a Lab Leak, Furthering the U.S. Intel Divide Over the Origins of the Virus

EXCERPT:

BERTRAND: “Back in 2021 the intel agencies, roughly 18 of them, they couldn’t come to a definitive conclusion about where this virus actually originated. That is still the case. But what we’re now seeing is that the Department of Energy has collected some new intelligence, according to our sources, that has led them to come to a conclusion that the lab leak theory is plausible and that it likely did come from a lab. Now, of course, that major caveat noted, that that assessment is low confidence, is very important, because low-confidence assessment generally means that the information obtained by the intel community is not reliable enough or it's too fragmented to make a more definitive judgment, or there’s simply not enough information available to draw a more robust conclusion about the origins of this pandemic. But bottom line here is that this really adds to the divide in the U.S. government over whether the pandemic began in China in 2019 as the result of a lab leak or whether it emerged naturally. There are, along with the Department of Energy, other agencies that also believe this could have emerged from a lab, including the FBI, which has medium confidence in that theory. However, the major intel agencies, for example, like the CIA, they still do not know definitively where this pandemic originated. So, there’s still a lot of work to be done, we’re told, before they can come to any kind of real analytic conclusion about this, and we should note there are many people inside the U.S. government that don’t believe that we may ever know for sure where this virus came from, Fred."

(Via CNN)