After the Department of Energy, the FBI chimes in with the COVID lab leak theory

FBI Director Christopher Wray said Tuesday that the COVID-19 pandemic was “most likely” caused by an incident at a laboratory in Wuhan, China.

“The FBI has long assessed that the origins of the epidemic are most likely a possible laboratory incident in Wuhan,” Ray said in an interview with Fox News.

The comments follow a report earlier this week that said the US Department of Energy determined that a leak from a Chinese laboratory was the most likely cause of the COVID-19 outbreak.

However, other agencies within the US intelligence community believe that the virus emerged naturally in the world.

In the interview, Wray also accused the Chinese government of trying to block US efforts to investigate the causes of the epidemic.

“The Chinese government is doing everything it can to try to derail and disrupt the work here, the work that we do, the work that our American government and our close foreign partners do,” Wray said. “This is unfortunate for everyone.”

Chinese officials angrily denied the allegation, calling it a smear campaign against Beijing.

The scientific community considers it crucial to identify the origins of a pandemic in order to combat or even prevent the next pandemic.