FBI Director Christopher Wray confirmed Tuesday that the bureau believes the COVID-19 pandemic originated from a laboratory leak in China. (See the video below.)
“The FBI has for some time now determined that the origin of the pandemic is likely to have occurred in a laboratory in Wuhan,” Wray told Fox News’ Bret Baier.
“Here you’re talking about the possibility of a leak from a Chinese government-controlled laboratory that killed millions of Americans, and what was designed for that capability,” he said.
Wray added a report that theorizes a laboratory leak has increased confidence in the possibility that the coronavirus, which has killed more than 6.8 million worldwide, including at least 1 million in the U.S., jumped from animals to humans in the Wuhan market.
A report this week stated that the Department of Energy now believes that the likely root of the outbreak is a Chinese laboratory, which is consistent with the FBI’s previous hypothesis. The Department of Energy’s stance begins with “low confidence” in intelligence reports, while the FBI operates with “moderate confidence,” CNN reported.
“I’m just going to make an observation that the Chinese government, it seems to me, has done its best to try to disrupt and confuse the work here, the work that is being done, the work that the US government and its close foreign partners are doing. And it’s unfortunate to everybody,” Wray told Baier.
A spokesman for China’s Foreign Ministry accused the US agency of undermining China and politics “the problem of the origin of the virus.”