China 'rebuts' US suspicion that Covid-19 leaked from Wuhan lab

According to AFP, at a regular press conference on December 3, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lin Jian said that the joint China-World Health Organization (WHO) expert team had "reached a scientifically sound conclusion" that the possibility of the virus leaking from a laboratory was "extremely unlikely".

"Without any substantive evidence, the so-called US report fabricated conclusions to mislead and slander China and provided false evidence," Lam Kiem added.

Earlier on December 2, a two-year investigation by US lawmakers concluded that the Covid-19 virus that has killed millions of people worldwide likely leaked from a laboratory in China.

The 520-page report from the House Special Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) examines a range of issues related to the pandemic, from the federal and state response in the US to the origins of the virus and vaccination efforts.

The US House of Representatives’ special subcommittee on the Covid-19 pandemic was convinced of the lab leak hypothesis after 25 meetings, more than 30 interviews, and over 1 million pages of documents. The investigation also included 2 days of closed-door interviews with American physician and immunologist Anthony Fauci.

According to Fox News, the report stated: "Covid-19 most likely originated from a laboratory in Wuhan, China."

“By most scientific measures, if there was evidence of a natural origin, it would have been presented,” the report says.

To support the "lab leak" hypothesis, the subcommittee said the virus that causes Covid-19 "has biological characteristics that are not found in nature".

They noted that the Wuhan Institute of Virology "has a history of conducting gain-of-function research at inadequate biosafety levels" and that researchers at the lab "were infected with a Covid-like virus in the fall of 2019, months before Covid-19 was detected at the (Wuhan) market."