Top U.S. intelligence service functionary iterate Thursday that they could not rule out the possibility that covid-19 leak out of a Chinese government lab , as fight back to originating from animal - to - human transmission .
“ From our perspective , we just do n’t eff where , when and how the coronavirus was channelise initially . We have two plausible theories that we ’re working on , ” said Haines , when call into question about the yield Thursday . “ One of them is that it was a laboratory stroke . And the other is that it emerge naturally from human liaison with septic fauna . ”
BURNS : “ I think at this stop , as Director Haines said , this is something that we ’re still examine , with the benefit of all of the various source that the intelligence agency community of interests can bring to bear . ”
Avril Haines.Photo: Joe Raedle (Getty Images)
FITZPATRICK : “ But , with regard to WHO ’s assessment , they ’ve patently come out and said it ’s very improbable . Is that consistent with the intelligence biotic community ’s assessment ? ”
BURNS : “ I recall that is not an assessment that we are prepared to make at this stop . We are weighing both of the option that Director Haines described . ”
When pushed , Haines subsequently reiterated the point : “ We do not make the assessment that the WHO report made — that it is “ extremely unlikely ” … that is not our assessment . ”
singular as it may sound , America ’s top spy are not alone . The WHO reportwas late criticizedby the establishment ’s own director - world-wide , Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus , who said that not enough research had been done on the issue and that “ further investigation ” was ask . More late , the former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention under President Trump , Robert Redfield , saidin a CNN interviewthat he believe the “ most likely etiology ” was “ from a laboratory , ” but it ’s currently unclear what justifies that more assured judgment .
It ’s certainly an challenging tour of events . While a orotund aggregate of scientist extend to be critical of this hypothesis , more and more health experts and government officials have get down to question the initial claims about covid-19 ’s origin ( those claims have , of course , shifted over sentence — and there’sa lot of disagreementin the scientific community on this topic , in general ) . Now , what was antecedently believe a cabal theory has increasingly become a logical ( or at least tolerable ) railway line of inquiry .
The U.S. intelligence residential area has been one of the most consistently ambivalent voices on this result . Last April , the Office of the Director of National Intelligence madethe unusual announcementthat it was investigate the “ lab news leak ” claims , though it order it did not trust the virus to be “ mankind - made . ” The natural action was originallyblamed on the Trump administration — which was said to be pressuring the intelligence community of interests to endorse the “ lab ” hypothesis . However , under Biden , America ’s top spies seem to be saying the same thing .
While this is all very interesting , it ’s perhaps helpful to note that we wo n’t have a exonerated picture of how this global calamity get for some metre — if ever . After the WHO report ’s release , a cadre of scientists recentlycalled fornew , politically impersonal investigating into the computer virus ’s descent , so the best we can all do at this point is stay tuned .
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