The German government for years concealed an assessment by its Foreign Intelligence Service that a lab origin of COVID-19 was overwhelmingly likely, according to a Tuesday investigative report by two German newspapers.

China denies German media reports of an assessment carried out by spying agency BND in 2020 supporting the theory.

New findings add weight to the theory that COVID-19 originated at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Experts point to lax security measures and allege China manipulated scientific journals to obscure the virus’s origins.

The spy agency assessment's was based on an unspecified intelligence operation code-named "Saaremaa" as well as on publicly-available data. It had been commissioned by the office of Germany's chancellor at the time, Angela Merkel, but never published, the report said.

The German parliament's oversight committee has called on the government to share the findings of an investigation into the origin of the coronavirus pandemic with the public, after reports that the government covered it up.

Germany's spy agency is in sync with the CIA in regard to the origins of COVID: Both think it likely originated in a lab in China. After its own analysis, Germany's BND foreign intelligence service thinks there's an 80% to 90% chance that the virus accidentally leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology,