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WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Sunday there was “a significant amount of evidence” that the new coronavirus emerged from a Chinese laboratory, but did not question the conclusion by US intelligence agencies that it was not done. by man.
“There is a significant amount of evidence that this came from that laboratory in Wuhan,” Pompeo told ABC’s “This Week,” referring to the virus that emerged late last year in China and has killed some 240,000 people across the globe. the world, including more than 67,000 in the United States.
Pompeo then briefly contradicted a statement released last Thursday by the United States’ top spy agency that the virus did not appear to be man-made or genetically modified. That statement undermines conspiracy theories promoted by anti-China activists and some supporters of President Donald Trump that suggest it was developed in a Chinese government biological weapons laboratory.
“The best experts so far seem to think it was man-made. I have no reason not to believe that right now,” said Pompeo. When the interviewer pointed out that this was not the conclusion of the US intelligence agencies. In the US, Pompeo stepped back and said, “I have seen what the intelligence community has said. I have no reason to believe that they were wrong.”
The State Department did not immediately respond to a request for clarification on Pompeo’s comments.
The China Global Times, led by Communist Party official People’s Daily, said in an editorial in response to Pompeo’s Sunday interview that it had no evidence that the virus came from the laboratory in Wuhan and was “cheating”, asking the United States to present the evidence.
“The Trump administration continues to engage in an unprecedented propaganda war as it tries to impede global efforts in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic,” the editorial said.
Thursday’s report by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said it coincided with “the broad scientific consensus” that the disease was not caused by man.
American officials familiar with the intelligence reports and analyzes have said for weeks that they do not believe Chinese scientists developed the coronavirus in a government biological weapons laboratory from which it later escaped.
Rather, they have said they believe it was introduced through human contact with wildlife at a meat market in the central city of Wuhan, or that it could have escaped from one of the two Wuhan government laboratories believed to be conducting civil investigations into possible biological risks.
Pompeo said Thursday that it was not known whether the virus came from the Wuhan Virology Institute, a meat market, or somewhere else. Trump said the same day that he was confident it might have originated from a Chinese virology laboratory, but declined to describe the evidence.
(Reporting by Daphne Psaledakis; Additional reporting by David Brunnstrom; Editing by Scott Malone, Daniel Wallis, and Peter Cooney)
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