Covid, surveillance, naval forces: US Congress holds multiple hearings about perceived Chinese threats
- Witnesses tell one subcommittee that intelligence agencies will eventually conclude the pandemic derived from a Wuhan lab leak
- Other hearing touch on the size of China’s fleet; the lack of an Indian Ocean strategy; and the need to join a trans-Pacific free-trade pact
US lawmakers pressed to declare a Chinese lab leak the US government’s operating assumption for Covid-19’s origin on Tuesday, potentially further inflaming relations with Beijing during a day of numerous congressional hearings examining perceived threats from China.
Testifying before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic Origins, John Ratcliffe, who served as director of national intelligence under former US president Donald Trump, repeatedly cited the lack of data from China proving a zoonotic spillover – in which a contagion jumps from animals to humans – as evidence of that Covid derived from a lab leak.
“Based upon my personal knowledge of conversations about analysts … it is a minority opinion that is currently holding back the [US Central Intelligence Agency] from” concluding that the novel coronavirus that causes Covid-19 was the result of experiments at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Ratcliffe said.
Pressure would continue to build on other agencies to make the same determination, Ratcliffe said.
The FBI has backed the lab-leak hypothesis with what the agency described as “moderate confidence”. Four other agencies, including the National Intelligence Council, have concluded with “low confidence” that the virus was transmitted naturally to humans through an animal host.