FBI Director Christopher Wray has stated during a recent interview that the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak can be attributed to a laboratory in Wuhan, China. In his statement on Tuesday, Wray further revealed that there exists classified material to support the FBI's assessment of the origin of the virus.

The FBI director's remarks add further fuel to the already contentious debate surrounding the cause of the pandemic. The Wuhan Institute of Virology has been at the center of numerous accusations, with several officials and organizations suggesting that the laboratory was responsible for the virus's emergence.

Fox News anchor Bret Baier questioned Wray about the FBI’s assessment, to which Wray responded, “the FBI has for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan.”

FBI Director Christopher Wray says that COVID-19 likely originated in a lab in communist China

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— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) February 28, 2023

“The FBI has folks, agents, professionals, analysts, virologists, microbiologists, etc., who focus specifically on the dangers of biological threats, which include things like novel viruses, like COVID, and the concerns that in the wrong hands, some bad guys, a hostile nation-state, a terrorist, a criminal,” Wray added. “The threats that those could pose.”

Wray continued:

So here you’re talking about a potential leak from a Chinese government-controlled lab that killed millions of Americans. And that’s precisely what that capability was designed for.

I should add that our work related to this continues, and there are not a whole lot of details I can share that aren’t classified.

I will just make the observation that the Chinese government, it seems to me, has been doing its best to try to thwart and obfuscate the work here. The work that we’re doing, the work that our U.S. government and close foreign partners are doing. And that’s unfortunate for everybody.