China says it's "extremely unlikely" that COVID-19​ came from a lab, after the CIA said it believed​, though with low confidence, that it did, rather than from natural transmission.

China on Monday dismissed the possibility that the virus that caused COVID-19 leaked from a lab, after the CIA said it now favors the so-called lab leak theory over natural transmission. “It is extremely unlikely the pandemic was caused by a lab leak,

China urged the US to “stop politicising and instrumentalising the issue of origin-tracing”. Read more at straitstimes.com.

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.

It was unclear the extent to which the agency has collected new intelligence on COVID-19's origins and whether that new evidence was used to formulate the latest assessment.

The news comes after the CIA announced over the weekend that COVID-19 most likely originated from a leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in 2020.

Ex-CNN editor Chris Cilizza conceded on Monday that he "screwed up" in his assessment of the lab leak theory, suggesting that President Trump was likely right about COVID's origins.

The CIA says both a natural origin and a lab leak "remain plausible" as potential sources of covid-19, following a review of the pandemic's origins.

Missouri is suing China for its role in the COVID-19 pandemic, Attorney General Andrew Bailey says.Bailey is preparing for the trial on Monday, January 27 at 2 p.m. It’ll be held at the federal courthouse in Cape Girardeau,

The CIA says lab leak is most likely source of COVID outbreak. But there is no consensus among scientists whether it originated in nature or from an accidental leak. Not to mention the fact we're still living with COVID: The World Health Organization COVID-19 Dashboard continues to report hundreds of thousands of cases every month worldwide.

India and China have agreed in principle to resume direct air services, nearly five years after flights were suspended.