Trump confirms U.S. investigating reports virus came from Chinese lab

President Trump on Friday confirmed that the U.S. government and intelligence agencies are investigating if the coronavirus outbreak began from poor security at a Wuhan laboratory.

Army Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said earlier this week that U.S. intelligence agencies were looking at whether a Wuhan laboratory may have been the source of the deadly outbreak of a disease similar to the severe acute respiratory syndrome that emanated from China in 2003.

Gen. Milley said the two theories about the origin of the virus, which scientists say is important to know for finding therapies and vaccines, are that it was a natural jump from bats to an animal at an exotic food market in Wuhan and then spread to humans.

“We’re looking at it,” Mr. Trump told reporters at a Rose Garden briefing on his coronavirus task force of reports the virus may have escaped from the Chinese research site in Wuhan. “A lot of people are looking at it.”

Mr. Trump added that the lab origin story “seems to make sense.”

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“They talk about a certain kind of bat, but that bat wasn’t in that area,” the president said. “. But that bat wasn’t sold at that wet zone,” he said referring to the wild animal market in Wuhan. “It wasn’t sold there. That bat was 40 miles away. A lot of strange things are happening.”

China has consistently denied that the deadly virus behind the global pandemic was created in one of its labs.

Earlier Friday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the U.S. government has continued to press China to allow virus investigators to visit the Wuhan Institute of Virology that houses China’s only very high-security laboratory capable of handling deadly pathogens.

China has conducted extensive research into bat coronaviruses and according to Chinese scientific studies has isolated hundreds of new animal viruses, including coronaviruses from bats.The virus behind the current deadly pandemic is known as SARS-CoV-2 for SARS coronavirus-2.

China has had laboratory virus escapes in the past of the first SARS virus according to virus experts.

A group of U.S. virus experts stated in an article in Nature Medicine in March that China in the past conducted research on coronaviruses at less secure laboratories. “We must therefore examine the possibility of an inadvertent laboratory release of SARS-CoV-2,” they stated.

Dr. Anthony Fauchi, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, was asked at the briefing if the virus was “man-made” and may have originated in a laboratory.

He said a study by a group of evolutionary virologists examined the genome sequences of the coronavirus and other bat viruses that evolved.

“And the mutations that took to get where it is now is totally consistent with a jump from a species to an animal to a human,” he said.

Mr. Pompeo said told Fox Business News Friday that the Chinese government and the World Health Organization failed to provide information about the virus in a timely manner “and the result of that is that we now have this global pandemic.

Earlier this week, he identified the Wuhan Institute of Virology as potentially having information about the spread of the new pneumonia-like disease.

“We are still asking the Chinese Communist Party to allow experts to get in to that virology lab so that we can determine precisely where this virus began,” he said on Fox Business Network. “It’s not political. This is about science and epidemiology. We need to understand what has taken place so that we can reduce [the] risk to Americans in the days and weeks and months ahead and get the global economy back on track.”

Mr. Pompeo was asked about news reports that warnings were sent by U.S. diplomats in China two years ago detailing lax security at research laboratories in Wuhan.

“Those are the kind of projects we’ve been engaged in, trying to help make sure that the technical know-how was available in those labs,” he said.

“And clearly, we need to investigate whether that took place here, whether they had the capability to handle the kinds of viruses that were being studied or worked on in that laboratory. We don’t know those answers. The Chinese Communist Party needs to open up and let us get those answers.”

China’s Foreign Ministry on Thursday again dismissed reports that the virus leaked from a Wuhan lab, saying WHO officials have “repeatedly stated that there is no evidence showing the virus was made in a lab.”

“Now [U.S. officials] are again hyping up the issue of origins, insinuating that the virus had something to do with the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” Mr. Zhao said. “It’s not difficult to see through their tricks which intend to muddy the waters, deflect attention and shift the blame to others.”

But other foreign leaders, including British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab and French President

Emmanuel Macron are echoing U.S. complaints about China’s actions. Mr. Macron on Thursday ridiculed claims China’s authoritarian government had done a better job dealing with the pandemic.

Let’s not be so naive as to say China has been much better at handling this,” the French leader told Britain’s Financial Times in an interview. “We don’t know — there are clearly things that have happened that we don’t know about.”

Origin debates

Mr. Zhao came under fire from Mr. Pompeo and President Trump last month for citing false reports that the virus originated in the United States and was spread to Wuhan by U.S. Army soldiers.

Viruses do not need to be made or bioengineered in a laboratory to be deadly or used as bioweapons. For example, smallpox and hemorrhagic viruses like Ebola are among six potential biological weapons, according to Mark Kortepeter, a former Army biological warfare expert.

Mr. Zhao also asserted that many renowned medical experts have “debunked” the lab leak theory as not science-based. Critics of the lab release theory have asserted that the virus was not bioengineered and could not have escaped from a laboratory.

A group of renowned U.S. virologists, writing in the journal Nature Medicine, stated in March that Chinese laboratories in the past have allowed the severe acute respiratory syndrome virus or SARS to leak.

“We must therefore examine the possibility of an inadvertent laboratory release of SARS-CoV-2,” they wrote using the formal name for the virus.