Why Scientists Think The Novel Coronavirus Developed Naturally — Not In A Chinese Lab

You could be forgiven for wondering how a disease as fast-moving and deadly as COVID-19 could just appear naturally, out of nowhere, seemingly overnight. President Trump expressed doubt, saying that “a lot of people” were looking at the possibility that a Chinese lab was responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic. Earlier that week, Fox News ran a story in which unnamed sources suggested that the COVID-19 outbreak originated in a Wuhan laboratory — the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which studies coronaviruses with a number of international collaborators. The New York Times reported that spy agencies are being pressured to find evidence blaming the lab, and at the end of April, the National Institutes of Health withdrew funding from a research consortium that had collaborated with the lab. As recently as this weekend, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, despite saying there was no reason to disbelieve the intelligence community’s assessment that the virus was neither manmade nor genetically modified, claimed there was “enormous evidence” connecting the virus to the WIV.

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