In one of his first acts as Donald Trump’s CIA director, John Ratcliffe had the agency publish an assessment backing the once relatively fringe theory that the COVID-19 pandemic began with an accidental leak at a research lab in the Chinese city of Wuhan.

New CIA Director John Ratcliffe ordered the covid origins analysis declassified, which a spokesperson described as a “low-confidence” assessment.

The CIA on Saturday offered a new assessment on the origin of the Covid outbreak, saying the coronavirus is "more likely" to have leaked from a Chinese lab than to have come from animals. But the intelligence agency cautioned it had "low confidence" in this determination.