Follow Up: CIA Assessment of COVID-19 Pandemic Origins vs. New CIA Director John Ratcliffe

Clarifying the context and distinguishing Ratcliffe's opinion from the agency's assessment under President Biden

This is a follow-up to my evaluation of the CIA’s ‘low confidence’ assessment regarding the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic. I have made several updates since publication, which are in the article itself:

The CIA's 25 January 2025 Statement About the 'Origins' of the COVID-19 Pandemic

Here’s my understanding of the basic timeline involved with this assessment:¹

• In the closing weeks of the Biden Administration, the CIA was directed to make an assessment about the origin of the COVID-19, based on existing information.

• The CIA produced an assessment that was classified and not released to the public.

• John Ratcliffe was sworn in as the New CIA Director on 23 January 2025.

• Ratcliffe declassified the assessment for public release.

• The assessment - a summary statement, not a full report - was emailed to news reporters from selected media outlets, presumably on Saturday, when it was reported to the public. The CIA did not release the assessment on the agency website.

• No media outlet has published a PDF or screenshot of the email. The version of the email that I cobbled together from two different sources and posted yesterday is similar to what FoxNews posted.²

  

• The statement addresses ‘the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic.” The words China, Wuhan, lab, leak, market, animal, accident, virus, SARS-CoV-2, coronavirus, Covid, and disease are not used. (Refer to this article for other observations.)

• The assessment was made under the Biden administration and is not the agency’s determination under new director John Ratcliffe.

• Ratcliffe has long favored the lab leak hypothesis of SARS-CoV-2/the virus said to cause a disease the WHO named COVID-19 and testified to that effect before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic in April 2023.

• Yesterday, during his first TV interview since being confirmed as CIA director, Ratcliffe said (emphasis mine),

  "I had the opportunity on my first day to make public an assessment that actually took place in the Biden administration, so it can't be accused of being political, and the CIA has assessed that the most likely cause of this pandemic that has wrought so much devastation around the world was because of a lab-related incident in Wuhan, so we'll continue to investigate that moving forward.” (Source: FoxNews.com)

• Ratcliffe’s characterization of what the assessment said conflicts with the assessment itself. The assessment published by media outlets did not say lab-related incident in Wuhan.

Alex Gutentag & Michael Shellenberger reported yesterday on

Public

that “the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has concluded that Covid-19 most likely emerged from a lab leak in Wuhan, an agency spokesman said in a statement on Saturday.”

Unless Gutentag and Shellenberger received a different statement, the CIA’s assessment did not “conclude that Covid-19 most likely emerged from a lab leak in Wuhan.”

The agency said it “assesses with low confidence that a research-related origin of the COVID-19 pandemic is more likely than a natural origin based on the available body of reporting.”

I left a comment for Gutentag and Shellenberger but did not receive a reply.

They are right to have called for full release of all relevant documents:

“The CIA and the US intelligence community more generally must declassify all materials related to WIV and Covid origins, as is mandated by the law. This should include any information about gain-of-function experiments, patients zero, military-led research at WIV, and involvement of US-based researchers and agencies.”

Articles related to my own views as to whether pandemic occurred and the origins of SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 can be found on this page.

In October, colleagues and I asked two ‘alternative’ outlets started during the COVID-Era and known for publishing viewpoints that challenged establishment narratives to consider hosting a written debate between us and Lab Origin/Leak proponents Alina Chan and Matt Ridley.

Both outlets - The Daily Sceptic and Brownstone Institute - declined.

"Question Everything" (Except That Thing)

Will Jones of DS said,

“We don't publish articles that question whether COVID-19 was due in large part to a novel virus spreading because our editorial line doesn't regard this view as a theory with merit. I think people know where we stand on that and we've been consistent.

Jeffrey Tucker of BI wrote,

“…[A]s described, I doubt we are the right venue. There is SO MUCH to learn and so much left to find out about precisely what happened. I don't want to get distracted from the larger picture of how precisely this coup against freedom came to be.

I look forward to reading any documents the CIA declassifies and releases.

In the meantime, it is still clear to me that the agency’s ‘new’ assessment did not say what many people are saying it said.

That includes John Ratcliffe.

1. Readers can apprise me of any incorrect information or missing details critical to the sequence of events.

2. Added 28 Jan 2025: The FoxNews headline is correct: “New CIA boss Ratcliffe says Biden-era report backing lab-leak theory released to 'restore' trust”. This is what Ratcliffe said, but Ratcliffe is wrong: The report (at least the summary assessment sent to media) did not say anything about a lab-leak theory. While FoxNews should be more critical of the conflict between Ratcliffe’s statements and the CIA assessment, they did exercise some caution in saying, “The CIA now appears to slightly favor the lab-leak theory that suggests gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China may have directly contributed to the virus.”