Health

WHO team visits Wuhan lab Trump claimed was coronavirus source

Beijing, Feb 3 (efe-epa).- A team of international experts from the World Health Organization mission investigating the origins of the coronavirus in China visited the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) and its maximum security P4 laboratory on Wednesday.

The head of the mission, Denmark’s Peter Ben Embarek, confirmed to the Chinese state-run Global Times that the scientists visited the laboratory the previous US administration of Donald Trump baselessly claimed was the source of the coronavirus.

China has strongly denied those accusations, calling them “lies and conspiracy theories” and pointing to several detections of the coronavirus in other countries as early as autumn in 2019. Before embarking on the trip, the head of the WHO mission said that his team would investigate the hypothesis that the virus had originated from a laboratory, “even if it is unlikely.”

“There is no evidence so far to indicate that anyone was working with the virus in the past; there is no evidence to indicate that it could have somehow escaped from the laboratory, but of course we will have that in mind when we look at the origin of this virus,” Ben Embarek said in a video released by WHO in January.

The vast majority of the international scientific community agrees that it is most likely that the virus jumped to humans from an animal. EFE-EPA

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