A former FBI scientist shed light this week on why the law enforcement agency thinks an accident in a Chinese lab is the most likely cause of the Covid-19 pandemic. But the evidence is circumstantial. The FBI based its “moderate confidence” assessment on the lack of any proof of a virus transfer from an animal to a human in Wuhan, the Chinese city where Covid first emerged, and the long distance — over a thousand miles — from Wuhan to the caves where bats carrying coronaviruses live, said Jason Bannan, who retired from the FBI two years ago. “You try to put all these things together and come up with an assessment with some confidence,” he said at an event sponsored by the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank. Why it matters: It’s been more than a year since FBI Director Christopher Wray told Fox News that the law enforcement agency subscribed to the lab leak theory. Wray said the agency had felt that way "for quite some time," but he didn't explain why. The FBI’s opinion, along with that of the Department of Energy, which says it believes the lab leak theory with “low confidence,” lent credence to a hypothesis once derided as a conspiracy theory. The Department of Health and Human Services this week cut off funding for the EcoHealth Alliance, a U.S.-based research group that had collaborated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology on studies involving coronaviruses that are at the center of the lab leak theory. In testimony to the House Covid Subcommittee released today, former National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins said the origin of the pandemic is unknown. And the NIH has proposed stricter controls over U.S. scientists working with foreign counterparts. Even so: Other agencies lean toward a natural origin for Covid, and some scientists on the Brookings panel agree with them. “It’s not correct to say that there’s no epidemiological evidence linking the origin of SARS-CoV-2 to a virus circulating in animal populations,” said Maciej Boni, a professor in the biology department at the Temple University College of Science and Technology in Philadelphia, referencing the scientific name for the coronavirus that causes Covid. “The genetic evidence is there. The market evidence is there. And also the geographic evidence is there, and it’s very strong,” he said, nodding to studies linking the pandemic’s origin to a market in Wuhan selling live wild animals that some scientists believe could have passed the virus to humans.
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