President Donald Trump said on Wednesday US government is trying to find out whether the pandemic coronavirus came from a lab in Wuhan, China.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo meanwhile said Beijing “needs to come clean” on what they know.
General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on Tuesday that US intelligence shows COVID-19 likely created naturally, as opposed to the theory that a laboratory in China made it. However, the source of the deadly virus is still a mystery.
Fox News reported yesterday that the virus originated in a Wuhan laboratory but not as a bioweapon but as part of China’s effort to show the world that it has an equal or more exceptional capability than the United States in terms of identifying and fighting viruses.
This may be the “costliest government coverup of all time,” one of the sources said.
The sources believe the initial transmission of the virus was bat-to-human, and that “patient zero” worked at the laboratory, then went into the population in Wuhan.
Also read: Scientists suspect Wuhan coronavirus came from bat soup
Trump says US investigating whether coronavirus came from Wuhan lab
Asked by Fox News about the reporting, President Trump said at Wednesday’s coronavirus press briefing, “More and more we’re hearing the story…we are doing a very thorough examination of this horrible situation.”
“I don’t want to discuss what I talked to him about the laboratory, I just don’t want to discuss, it’s inappropriate right now,” Trump said when asked if he had raised the subject in his conversations with Chinese President Xi Jinping.
The Chinese state-backed Wuhan Institute of Virology denied the rumors that the new coronavirus may have been created at one of its laboratories or perhaps escaped from such facility in February.
“We know this virus originated in Wuhan, China,” said Pompeo. The Institute of Virology is only a handful of miles away from the wet market.
“We really need the Chinese government to open up” and help explain “exactly how this virus spread,” said Pompeo.
“The Chinese government needs to come clean,” he said.
Earlier researches and studies said the virus originated from bats that were being sold in Wuhan’s wet market.
According to the report of Johns Hopkins Univeristy, the USA is now the epicenter of the pandemic with a total of 609,696 confirmed cases and 26,059 deaths as of April 15,