Beijing rejected the CIA’s findings that COVID-19 was likely leaked from a Chinese research laboratory. “It is ‘extremely unlikely’ that the pandemic was caused by a lab leak — this is the authoritative conclusion reached by the experts of the WHO-China joint mission based on science following their field trips to the lab in Wuhan

The problem for the lab-leak position is that the U.S. has never had access to the Wuhan lab and has thus been unable to reach a definitive answer for more than five years. Now that the CIA has at last come to a conclusion, not all scientists are sold on what it has reported, seeing the results as thinly scientifically sourced.