Trump's pick for CIA Director John Ratcliffe believed Covid originated from China’s lab

John Ratcliffe, the incoming Director of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), has said that lab-leak is the only possible explanation for the origin of Covid-19.

US President-elect Donald Trump has picked Ratcliffe as the Director of CIA in his second term. He had previously served as the Director of National Intelligence in his first term.

Ratcliffe is the latest China hawk to be added to Trump’s incoming administration. He is also among the growing group of public figures leaning towards the lab-origin of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The idea that SARS-CoV-2, the virus causing Covid-19 disease, could have originated in a lab in China’s Wuhan was initially rejected as a conspiracy theory by much of the mainstream media, but as no proof of natural origin has emerged and a consistent trickle of evidence has emerged indicating a possible lab-origin, the opinion has shifted in recent years.

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In a testimony last year to the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, Ratcliffe  had said: “My informed assessment as a person with as much access as anyone to our government’s intelligence … has been and continues to be that a lab leak is the only explanation credibly supported by our intelligence, by science and by common sense."

Ratcliffe further said, “If our intelligence and evidence supporting a lab leak was placed side by side with our intelligence and evidence pointing to a natural origins or spillover theory, the lab leak side of the ledger would be long, convincing, even overwhelming — while the spillover side would be nearly empty and tenuous.”

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Ratcliffe has also accused China of covering up efforts to understand the origin of the pandemic.

China resorted to “destroying medical tests, samples and data to intimidating and disappearing witnesses and journalists to lying and coercing global health authorities even spreading propaganda”, said Ratcliffe at the hearing.

Ratcliffe also criticised CIA in the hearing, the intelligence agency he would be heading in January.

“To this day, the CIA, unquestionably the world’s premier spy agency with an unrivaled capacity to acquire information, has continued to state that it does not have enough information to make any formal assessment…To put it bluntly, this is unjustifiable—and a reflection not that the agency can’t make an assessment with any confidence, but that it won’t,” said Ratcliffe.