Washington: US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has said that the coronavirus may have originated due to the activities of laboratories in the Chinese city of Wuhan.
An international team of experts of the World Health Organization (WHO) arrived in Wuhan earlier this week to study the origin of the pandemic. During this visit, the US Department of State shared data regarding the outbreak in a hope that the WHO will press the Chinese authorities for more information regarding the deadly virus.
In A statement released late on Friday Pompeo said
“The United States government has reason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV [Wuhan Institute of Virology] became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses. This raises questions about the credibility of WIV senior researcher Shi Zhengli’s public claim that there was ‘zero infection’ among the WIV’s staff and students of SARS-CoV-2 or SARS-related viruses,”.
