FBI Director Christopher Wray said on Tuesday that COVID-19 "most likely" leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
"The FBI," Wray told Fox News, "has for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan."
"The FBI has folks 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 the threats that those could pose.
"So here you are 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."
Wray said, according to The Wall Street Journal, that the Chinese Communist Party has been trying to "thwart and obfuscate" FBI investigations into COVID-19's origins as well as other parts of the U.S. government and foreign partners.
Wray's statement followed the Department of Energy's classified report that the COVID-19 pandemic occurred due to an unintended lab leak. But the Energy Department, according to reports, reached that assessment with "low confidence."
Nonetheless, China has disputed such claims maintaining that the pandemic emerged outside of its territory.
"The origin of the novel coronavirus is a scientific issue and should not be politicized," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning stated during a Monday press conference.
Despite the statements from the Energy Department and now the FBI, some U.S. politicians are still proceeding cautiously to name China as the location where COVID-19 emerged.
"The bottom line is we've got to get to the bottom of this," Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., stated. "The Biden administration is committed to it. They have all kinds of people looking at it, and we'll wait to see their results."
But while much of the media focus has been on where COVID-19 had arisen from, no known federal reports outline how it got there in the first place.
In the waking days of the pandemic, scientists, experts, and media heads maintained that COVID-19 emerged from an animal at the Wuhan wet market located a few miles from the Wuhan lab. But so far, no animal host has been found. Slowly, more reports continue to indicate COVID-19 leaked unintentionally from the lab.
On Monday, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby noted that President Joe Biden supports "a whole-of-government effort" to uncover what led to the pandemic.
"We're just not there yet," he stated. "If we have something that is ready to be briefed to the American people and the Congress, we will do that."