FPI / January 31, 2025
Geostrategy-Direct
New CIA Director John Ratcliffe bluntly criticized the intelligence agency’s penchant the last four years for staying on the “sidelines” during major crises such as the Covid pandemic.
“One of the things that I’ve talked about a lot is addressing the threat from China on a number of fronts, and that goes back to why a million Americans died and why the Central Intelligence Agency has been sitting on the sidelines for five years in not making an assessment about the origins of Covid,” Ratcliffe said shortly after being sworn in as CIA chief.
“That’s a Day 1 thing for me. I’ve been on record, as you know, in saying I think our intelligence, our science and our common sense all really dictate that the origins of Covid was a leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”
The CIA did not make that assessment publicly during President Joe Biden’s term, he said.
“So I’m going to focus on that and look at the intelligence and make sure that the public is aware that the agency is going to get off the sidelines.”
President Donald Trump has said for years that the pandemic originated from the Wuhan Institute.
“Some of the intelligence is classified, and I can’t talk about it, but common sense tells you it most likely — and when I say most likely, like 95% — came from the Wuhan lab,” Trump said in a 2021 interview with Sky News Australia. “I don’t know if they had bad thoughts or whether it was gross incompetence, but one way or the other, it came out of Wuhan, and it came from the Wuhan lab.”
Many U.S. health agency officials, including former White House medical adviser Anthony Fauci, aggressively sought to dismiss the lab leak theory in public statements. They insisted that a wild animal, possibly at a wet market in Wuhan, was the most likely origin of the virus.
Senate Republicans have accused Fauci of providing inaccurate information about the U.S. role in conducting gain-of-function research in China. Biden granted him a preemptive pardon shortly before leaving office.
Related: Bioweapon exercise? Wuhan coronavirus outbreak provides wargame data, March 24, 2020
Congressional investigators have revealed that a group of American virologists took steps to play down the Wuhan laboratory source for Covid. The investigations also showed that federal money was being used by EcoHealth Alliance, a New York-based research group, to fund risky virus research at the Wuhan lab.
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