Langley joins the FBI and Energy Department in agreeing that a lab leak is the most likely source of the pandemic.

The nuanced finding suggests the agency believes the totality of evidence makes a lab origin more likely than a natural origin.

Since COVID-19 first took off, political leaders, infectious disease specialists, and the lay public have debated its origins. Eventually, two hypotheses emerged: Either the virus crossed over from animals to humans in a wet market in Wuhan—the city in which the disease first appeared—or it leaked from a Chinese lab,