According to WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the most likely explanation was a catastrophic accident at a laboratory in Wuhan, where infections first spread during late 2019, Daily Mail reported.
The situation is such that China is on the brink of its biggest COVID-19 crisis since Wuhan.
The SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus that causes Covid-19, has mutated and resulted in different variants of the virus, including the latest Omicron. The Delta strain is regarded as the most contagious form of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus to date. The new variant NeoCoV has been discovered among bats in South Africa.
The new evidence gathered from the US government documents under Freedom of Information backs the theory that Covid-19 emerged from bats and that the SARS-CoV-2 virus escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in China, the Daily Mail reported.
The study states the first patient worked at Huanan live animal market in the central Chinese city, The New York Times reported on Thursday.
One of the scientists who signed a letter published in The Lancet on March 7 last year rejecting the lab-leak theory had links to Chinese researchers, their colleagues or funders.
The Director of National Intelligence in a report, prepared at the direction of the president, on Friday said SARS-CoV-2 probably emerged and infected humans through an initial small-scale exposure.
Researchers from the Chinese government's Key Laboratory of Southwest China Wildlife Resources Conservation, the University of Oxford in the UK and the University of British Columbia in Canada collected data from several markets in Wuhan and photographs from the Huanan seafood market for their research which concluded that animals known as carriers of coronaviruses were sold at local wet markets for years.
The Wuhan branch of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention was handling coronaviruses “without potentially having the same level of expertise or safety or who knows,” Peter Ben Embarek said during a conference call in January, according to footage shown by TV2.
When WHO traveled to China earlier this year to investigate the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, Peter Ben Embarek said he was worried about biosafety standards at a laboratory close to the market where the first human cases were detected.
Last year, Wuhan completed a comprehensive nucleic acid testing campaign, during which it tested nearly 10 million residents in 19 days.
According to the new evidence, scientists at the WIV have been able to genetically modify coronaviruses without leaving a trace of that modification since 2005.
At least 18 provinces in China have even sounded an alarm about COVID-19, as more than 300 domestic cases were detected in 10 days.
The report also raises concern that the lab was conducting "gain-of-function" research in an unsafe environment.
The US and others say that China has not been transparent about what happened in the early days of the pandemic. China accuses critics of seeking to blame it for the pandemic and politicizing an issue that should be left to scientists.
Nanjing, which has a population of more than 9.3 million, plans to carry out city-wide nucleic acid testing after the campaign in Jiangning district concludes, the municipal government said.
Senator Paul suggested that Dr Fauci had lied before Congress when in May he denied that the National Institutes of Health funded so-called “gain of function” research — the practice of enhancing a virus in a lab to study its potential impact in the real world — at a Wuhan virology lab.
In recent months, the lab-leak theory has gained great traction pushing US President Joe Biden to give the American intelligence team a 90-day deadline to find answers into the virus origin.
Jesse Bloom, a virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, described the removal of the sequencing data in a new paper posted online on bioRxiv on Tuesday.
The Wuhan lab has drawn global scrutiny because of its research on bat coronaviruses in the city where the pandemic began. The lab leak theory has recently become the subject of renewed public debate after several prominent scientists called for a full investigation into the origins of the virus.
Top News
Latest News
