Foreign ministry spokesman Mao Ning said the laboratory leak conclusion being extremely unlikely was reached by the China-WHO joint expert team based on field visits to relevant Wuhan laboratories.

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.