The director of the FBI named a leak from a Chinese laboratory as the likely cause of the COVID-19 pandemic

Director of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation, Christopher Wray, in an interview with the Fox News channel, called a leak from a Chinese laboratory the most likely cause of the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. According to him, the department has considered this a priority version “for quite a long time.”

Ray’s statement came a few days after it became known that such a version is being considered by the US Department of Energy, which oversees a network of scientific laboratories. The Wall Street Journal noted that two agencies came to such a hypothesis independently of each other.

Interlocutors of the publication note that despite the coincidence of positions, the Ministry of Energy and the FBI came to the version about the leak for different reasons.

In an interview with Fox News, Ray also accused the Chinese government of trying to stop US efforts to investigate the causes of the pandemic. “The Chinese government… was doing everything possible to try to interfere and confuse the work being done by the US government and close foreign partners,” he said. Beijing categorically denies the version about the laboratory origin of the virus.

The hypothesis of a laboratory origin appeared immediately after the outbreak of the disease in the city of Wuhan in China in 2019. Its supporters noted that one of the world’s largest centers for the study of coronaviruses is located in Wuhan. In it, in particular, the SARS atypical pneumonia virus, which is close to the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, is studied.

In April 2020, the Fox channel stated that the first patient with the disease was an employee of the Wuhan laboratory. In 2002–2003, the World Health Organization drew attention to shortcomings in the security systems of Chinese virological centers.

The laboratory version does not necessarily imply that the virus was created artificially. It could be found in nature and studied by scientists or even be among the collected samples that did not reach the research stage. The American intelligence in its secret report is inclined to believe that the employees of the Wuhan laboratory did not know about the leak at the time of the beginning of the pandemic.