Why I’m Still Not Convinced Of The “Lab Leak” Theory
On 1/23/2025, John Ratcliff became Director of the CIA, two days later The New York Times published an article with the headline “C.I.A. Now Favors Lab Leak Theory to Explain Covid’s Origins.” Of course, given Ratcliff had been advocating for the lab leak theory for years, even once calling for China to be stripped of its ability to hold the 2022 Olympics because of their “massive cover up of the virus’s origins and the circumstances surrounding [COVID-19’s] initial outbreak,” this is not even slightly surprising.
It should be noted that the CIA is not endorsing this notion per se, the agency still believes “the intelligence behind it is fragmentary and incomplete,” but they do view it as the most likely possibility — although they don’t really have enough information to take a stance on any option being the cause of COVID-19. The piece also notes that both the idea of it being a lab leak and the notion of the virus being a mutation of an illness found in bats both have specific smoking gun evidence which could prove either to be true, but we simply don’t have either of those at the moment.
The political nature of this shift is especially worth noting because the CIA has not claimed to find new evidence — by its own admission, only one thing could beyond a shadow of a doubt that this was the case and they don’t have it — but instead they argue that the proof they already had pointed to this totally different way of looking at the pandemic, and nobody realized it until yesterday. It is worth remembering that a large part of Project 2025’s goal is to make the Executive Branch, in all of its aspects, more based around what the President wants. Even without keeping that in mind, it is not impossible to imagine intelligence being fixed in order to make a foreign power the administration is against look worse — anybody who remembers the Iraq War waged by George W. Bush can tell you about that.
The media should be asking if the CIA is simply coming to this conclusion because Donald Trump — who filled his last administration with China Hawk’s such as Peter Navarro and John Bolton and is adding people like Macro Rubio, Pete Hegseth, and the aforementioned CIA Director — believes that doing so would best serve his geopolitical aims. Obviously, this is not to claim that the possibility of COVID-19 coming from a lab is so absurd those pushing it must be lying, but certainly these connections are worth exploring before discissions are made regarding how to respond to this shift in the narrative.
Similarly, it is worth acknowledging that this all happened the same month as the unpopular TikTok ban — which Trump flip-flopped on, going from endorsing it while President to campaigning against it in 2024 — went into effect before being undone in only a handful of hours. The fight against TikTok, as John Oliver discussed in his episode on the topic, was greatly influenced by anti-China fears. The fact that many responded to the threat of a ban through going to the openly Chinese app RedNote, certainly shows that many Americans are not convinced of the anti-Chinese narrative many in the American government want its citizens to believe.
