outbreak on a coronavirus variant. cnn has previously reported that the lab was studying coronaviruses in bats but it is unclear how closely related the variants were to the strain which started the pandemic. as for the energy department s new assessment, it is described as low confidence and a minority view apparently within the intelligence community. that said, it sparked new calls today from transparency from china. we would wish to see from the prc a greater degree of responsibility, a greater acknowledgment that it is in the interests of the chinese people, yes, we better understand the origins of covid-19, but it is in the or to understand the origins of covid-19. today s development also prompted to leading house republicans to send letters demanding the state department of energy and the fbi to provide testimony and documents related to the ongoing probe of the ten pandemics origin. china s foreign minister also weighed in, calling on relevant parties to quote,
places is certainly suggestive. but the question you pinpoint is, was this something in the lab, was this something that could be weaponized, is that white spread so fast? or was this a natural occurrence? and you know, even going back to the director of national intelligence, the national intelligence council, the gray beards of the entire spy world in their conclusions, when you go back to the original report, for intelligence agencies believe that it was a natural exposure from an animal, one intelligence agency which we believe was the fbi said with moderate confidence they believed it was a leak from the lab. and three remained unable to coalesce around a given theory, because of the intelligence gaps, the things that we didn t know. the department of energy coming over big gives us a confusing one when they say low confidence. was anything ruled out like bio terrorism? what was ruled out was unintentionally or intentional launch. that is really
actu sat operates. that s going to be an important guide for investigators moving forward as they figure out what exactly would cause a partial ping. john, i ve spoken to you several times in the whole process of this three week now news story. richard yesterday when we spoke was saying he still believes nefarious reasons behind why this plane went down. what do you think from everything that you ve seen and studied on this? honestly, piers, gun to my head i still don t know what happened. i don t have a clear theory guiding one way or another. what we ve tried to do is let the facts come out as they may without trying to preordain them against a given theory that we re working with. certainly what we have is another bread crumb in a series of bread crumbs that have led us from all the way from kuala lumpur to the gulf of thailand to the andeman sea and now here off the coast of australia thousands of miles from where this flight first began, where