China Lab Is ‘Most Credible’ Source Of Coronavirus Outbreak, Trump Official Says

Donald Trump’s Deputy National Security Adviser Matthew Pottinger believes that the “most credible” source of the coronavirus outbreak is a leak from a research laboratory in China, The Daily Mail reported.

According to Pottinger, there is a “growing body of evidence” to support the theory that the Wuhan Institute of Virology is the source of the deadly outbreak that has spread across the globe.

“Even establishment figures in Beijing have openly dismissed the wet market story,” he said at a Zoom conference with MPs on China that took place last week.

Pottinger accused the World Health Organization of being influenced by China and suggested that the specialized United Nations agency’s forthcoming investigation into the origins of the outbreak in the capital of Central China’s Hubei province will not reveal the truth.

Iain Duncan Smith, the former Tory Party leader who attended the meeting, noted that Beijing’s refusal to allow journalists into the laboratory has increased suspicion of its role in the pandemic.

“The truth is there are people who have been in those labs who maintain that this is the case,” he said.

Nevertheless, Smith acknowledged that it’s unclear what kind of research could be the possible source of the outbreak.

“They may well have been fiddling with bat coronaviruses and looking at them and they made a mistake. I’ve spoken to various people who believe that to be the case.”

As noted by New Scientist, researchers at the Ohio State University found no evidence that the coronavirus was genetically engineered. In particular, the genome of the virus did not show any inserted gene sequences and showed a genetic distribution that skewed random, which the publication suggested points to natural evolution.

“Even the most secure laboratories do sometimes have accidents, and a human-engineered pandemic has been identified as a possible risk to our civilisation, but there is no good evidence that either has happened.”

Elsewhere, scientists published a report in Nature Medicine that found no proof that SARS-CoV-2 was artificially manipulated. However, the same study found that the virus did not originate in Wuhan’s fish market.

As The Inquisitr reported, a report from the Beijing-sponsored South China University of Technology found that the Wuhan Center for Disease Control was conducting experiments on disease-ridden bats. The report alleged that researchers in the lab might have been infected by the bats. The paper also noted that WHCDC is located adjacent to the Union Hospital, where the first doctors were infected during the pandemic.