CIA Official Confirms Sudden Shift in COVID-19 Origin Assessment

The change was precipitated by an encounter with a person or new information, according to a newly released document.

The seal of the Central Intelligence Agency at the entrance of the agency headquarters in McLean, Va., on Sept. 24, 2022. Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters

The CIA abruptly changed its assessment of the origins of COVID-19 from favoring a laboratory source to neutral, a newly released document confirms.

CIA analysts had come to believe that COVID-19 came from a high-level laboratory in Wuhan, China, located near where the first COVID-19 cases were detected in 2019, senior CIA officer James Erdman III told lawmakers in May. But the CIA changed its stance over the span of five days in 2021, according to Erdman.