We had this in the headlines a couple days ago but it's worth looking at in more detail. 

Back in April 2023, the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability’s Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic held a congressional hearing in which they took testimony from Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe. Ratcliffe was asked about claims that researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology got sick and were hospitalized near the time of the initial outbreak. His response didn't offer any inside information but he did suggest that there was an easy way for China to disprove the lab leak theory and its connection to those illnesses, one which China had not taken.

“There has been public reporting about intelligence that those researchers became patients and were hospitalized,” he said. He continued, “Without confirming the accuracy of that what I would submit to you is, if that is in fact the case and those hospitalizations took place the lab results and tests from those patients, if submitted for genetic sequencing, would be dispositive of the issue of whether or not those initial patient zeroes worked at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

“I would submit to you that in China there are not HIPAA considerations that prevent the Chinese government from accessing that. I would submit to you that if this took place they have the answers to that and I would submit to you that if the answers were exculpatory in nature that information would have been shared by the Chinese government which it has not.”

The pushback on the claims about those sick scientists is that China had a very bad flu season that winter (2019) and those individuals simply had the flu. Ratcliffe was clearly phrasing his statements in a way to avoid revealing any secret information but reporter Josh Rogin, in an interview with Bari Weiss, said he was aware of some of the secret intelligence about the Wuhan lab and that it suggested those sick lab workers did not have the flu.

“What it says is that the symptoms that these sick researchers had were not your everyday flu symptoms,” Rogin said. He continued, “In other words, they were COVID specific symptoms necessarily and these include no smell and what are called ground-glass opacities in the lungs.

“That doesn’t medically prove that they had COVID but that’s some pretty specific symptoms.”

Now jump forward to last Friday and John Ratcliffe is now Trump's incoming head of the CIA. Up until now the CIA has not taken a position on whether the lab leak or natural transmission from animals was the more likely explanation for the pandemic. In an interview with Breitbart News, Ratcliffe said he wanted to get the CIA off the sidelines on the issue of COVID's origins.

“I know from conversations with the president about where his priorities are and where he wants things to be as it concerns foreign threats to America’s national security posture, and it starts with China,” Ratcliffe said. “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. That’s a day-one 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 dictates that the origins of COVID was a leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. But the CIA has not made that assessment or at least not made that assessment publicly. 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.”

So Ratcliffe was clearly focused on this and about a day after that interview was published, the CIA announced it had in fact taken sides and now believed with low confidence that the lab leak was the more likely explanation.

The CIA now believes the virus responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic most likely originated from a laboratory, according to an assessment released Saturday that points the finger at China even while acknowledging that the spy agency has "low confidence" in its own conclusion...

"CIA assesses with low confidence that a research-related origin of the COVID-19 pandemic is more likely than a natural origin based on the available body of reporting. CIA continues to assess that both research-related and natural origin scenarios of the COVID-19 pandemic remain plausible," a spokesperson for the agency said in a statement, noting they "will continue to evaluate any available credible new intelligence reporting or open-source information that could change CIA's assessment."

So what happened here? Did Ratcliffe walk into his new office and demand the CIA adopt his position? By all accounts that's not what happened. In fact, a review of intelligence on COVID was ordered last month by outgoing Biden administration National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan.

Officials said the agency was not bending its views to a new boss, and that the new assessment had been in the works for some time.

In the final weeks of the Biden administration, Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, ordered a new classified review of the pandemic’s origin. As part of that review, the agency’s previous director, William J. Burns, told analysts that they needed to take a position on the origins of Covid, though he was agnostic on which theory they should embrace, a senior U.S. intelligence official said.

Another senior U.S. official said it was Mr. Ratcliffe’s decision to declassify and release the new analysis.

So the review was already underway. All Ratcliffe did was decide to make the results public knowledge. There is reportedly no new information behind this changed stance, though CIA analysts apparently did take a fresh look at some of the information they already had.

The analysis, however, is based in part on a closer look at the conditions in the high security labs in Wuhan province before the pandemic outbreak, according to people familiar with the agency’s work.

Is that new focus on the condition of the workers who became ill in December 2019? Maybe or maybe it's something else. But it is curious that all of this was put in motion as the Biden administration was leaving office. 

Another thing John Ratcliffe has previous said is that the CIA was holding back on reaching an assessment because the implications for our foreign policy would have been overwhelming. "The real problem is, the only assessment the agency could make — which is that a virus that killed over a million Americans originated in a C.C.P.-controlled lab whose research included work for the Chinese military — has enormous geopolitical implications that the Biden administration does not want to face head-on," he said. So the timing is curious but not in the way that most people looking at this might think. 

There is still a divide in the intelligence community over the origins of COVID. 

The FBI and the Energy Department have said it was likely the virus was the result of a lab leak, while other agencies assessed that natural human exposure to an infected animal was the most likely scenario. The CIA had been agnostic until now.

What's missing is a smoking gun for either argument. In the meantime, China continues to deny the lab leak theory.

A top Chinese official on Monday denied suggestions from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency that the Covid-19 pandemic was triggered by the virus leaking from a lab.

“The conclusion that a laboratory leak is extremely unlikely was reached by the joint China–WHO expert team based on field visits to relevant laboratories in Wuhan,” said Mao Ning, Beijing's Foreign Ministry spokesperson, at a press briefing.

The one thing we know for certain is that China can't be taken at its word. They have lied and hidden information too often to be trusted.