Beijing has never fully co-operated with international investigators, impeding the search for a definitive answer. But scientists continue their quest to establish the causes of a global health crisis that killed millions of people, caused trillions of dollars of economic damage and increased fears over the risks of virus research.

The problem for the lab-leak position is that the U.S. has never had access to the Wuhan lab and has thus been unable to reach a definitive answer for more than five years. Now that the CIA has at last come to a conclusion, not all scientists are sold on what it has reported, seeing the results as thinly scientifically sourced.

The Central Intelligence Agency with a "low confidence" has changed its stance and concluded that it's likely the COVI-19 virus was leaked from a Chinese lab before it became a global pandemic five years ago.

T he Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) recently assessed that the COVID-19 pandemic is more likely to have originated from a laboratory leak in Wuhan, China, though it maintains l