I first saw this headline on the Jerusalem Post as I was reading about the latest West bank violence:
COVID-19 likely originated in Chinese lab leak, US Energy Dept. says - report
US Energy confirming that RW talking point. Could this be real? More searching called for. Wall Street Journal:
Lab Leak Most Likely Origin of Covid, U.S. Agency Now Says
So I finally went to CNN. A bit more cautionary:
US Energy Department assesses Covid-19 likely resulted from lab leak, furthering US intel divide over virus origin
Aha! There’s a divide. Reading on in the CNN piece:
Two sources said that the Department of Energy assessed in the intelligence report that it had “low confidence” the Covid-19 virus accidentally escaped from a lab in Wuhan.
Intelligence agencies can make assessments with either low, medium or high confidence. A low confidence assessment generally means that the information obtained is not reliable enough or is too fragmented to make a more definitive analytic judgment or that there is not enough information available to draw a more robust conclusion.
The latest assessment further adds to the divide in the US government over whether the Covid-19 pandemic began in China in 2019 as the result of a lab leak or whether it emerged naturally.
#1 Why does the Energy Dept. have any mojo in this issue
#2 Why TF are ‘likely’ statements coming out from them when assessments are ‘low?’ Did they actually say ‘likely’? I can’t seem to find that statement (although I could have missed it somewhere.) The Jerusalem Post’s article directly references the WSJ. More Murdoch shenanigans?
Anyone with more insight on this, please comment.