Washington, March 1 (IANS) Christopher Wray, Director of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), has said that the Covid-19 pandemic "most likely" originated from a "Chinese government-controlled lab" in Wuhan city.

Despite these different assessments, White House national security spokesman John Kirby stated that the US government has yet to reach a definitive conclusion and consensus on the pandemic's origins. When asked about the Wall Street Journal report, China's foreign ministry referred to a WHO-China report that suggests the pandemic had a natural origin rather than a lab leak. Some scientists are open to the lab-leak theory, but many scientists believe the virus came from animals, mutated, and jumped into people — as has happened in the past with viruses. Alina Chan, a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard, said she isn’t sure what new intelligence the agencies had, but “it’s reasonable to infer” it relates to activities at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. She said a 2018 research proposal co-authored by scientists there and their US collaborators “essentially described a blueprint for Covid-like viruses.” “Less than two years later, such a virus was causing an outbreak in the city,” she said. The Wuhan institute had been studying coronaviruses for years, in part because of widespread concerns — tracing back to SARS — that coronaviruses could be the source of the next pandemic.