The CIA, now under new management, has declared that the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes Covid “most likely” originated and then leaked from a lab at Wuhan in Communist China.

The Central Intelligence Agency previously said that two explanations were plausible, a lab leak or a natural source for the virus. Yet under new agency director John Ratcliffe, the CIA has changed its view, which is now in line with that of the Department of Energy and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

“Based on the available body of reporting, CIA evaluates with low confidence that a research-related genesis of the Covid-19 pandemic is more likely than a natural origin,” an agency spokesman said on Saturday.

A day after Mr. Ratcliffe was sworn in, he vowed that setting the CIA’s assessment of Covid’s origins would be a “day-one thing for me.”

“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,” Mr Ratcliffe told Breitbart News on Friday.

“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,” Mr. Ratcliffe said.

“I’ve been on record, as you know, in saying I think our intelligence, our science, and our common sense all really dictates that the origins of Covid was a leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” he said. “But the CIA has not made that assessment or at least not made that assessment publicly.”

The agency did note, however, that it has “low confidence in this judgment” and “continues to assess that both research-related and natural origin scenarios of the Covid-19 pandemic remain plausible.” The CIA’s new perspective did not come about because of new evidence but rather from agency analysts reviewing existing information, a source told NBC News. 

The CIA review was ordered in the final weeks of the Biden administration and finished before President Trump’s inauguration, the source said. Mr. Ratcliffe decided to declassify the assessment, the official added. 

The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Senator Cotton, said he was “pleased” the CIA has reached a more firm conclusion and applauded Mr. Ratcliffe for releasing its opinion. “Now, the most important thing is to make China pay for unleashing a plague on the world,” Mr. Cotton, who is a Republican from Arkansas, said in a statement. 

Mr. Ratcliffe said the new assessment helps the president. “As President Trump deals with [Chinese] President Xi [Jinping], he needs to be armed with the very best intelligence and to be able to talk about China in a way that if they caused or contributed to the death of a million Americans, the president needs to be armed with that,” Mr. Ratcliffe said.

China took issue with the new CIA assessment, saying on Monday that it was “extremely unlikely” SARS-CoV-2 came from a laboratory. “The conclusion that a laboratory leak is extremely unlikely was reached by the China-WHO joint expert team based on field visits to relevant laboratories in Wuhan,” foreign ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning said.

“This has been widely recognized by the international community and the scientific community,” she said, adding that Washington should “stop smearing and shifting the blame to other countries (and) should respond to the legitimate concerns of the international community as soon as possible.”

The Wuhan Institute of Virology, which conducted research into bat coronaviruses and reportedly suffered from security lapses, has long been cited as the source of the virus, which was first detected at Wuhan in late 2019. The lab is about 30 miles from the Huanan wet market where the first infections emerged.