DOMINIC Raab has demanded that China provide “all the answers” on the origin of coronavirus – but said Britain doesn’t believe it came from a Wuhan lab.
The foreign secretary urged Beijing to cooperate with ongoing investigations into the source of the virus amid claims of a cover-up.
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Mr Raab said officials at the G7 summit in Cornwall had “compared notes” over the theory that it originated from a leak from a lab in Wuhan.
He said the UK’s “best information” remained that it “jumped” from animals to humans but admitted they did not have “all the answers”.
The foreign secretary told Sky News’s Trevor Phillips on Sunday programme: “That’s why internationally we wanted the review to be able to go into China to get all the answers, so that we have the full picture rather than these possible, potential, plausible options.
“But, on balance, we do not believe that it came from a laboratory.
“We think it is much more likely to have jumped from animal species.”
It comes after senior figures at the World Health Organisation last week called for a probe into the origins of the pandemic.
Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the lab leak theory could not be ruled out and demanded “transparency” from China.
Scientists believe that the virus is likely to have passed from animals to humans – but may have escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which investigates other coronaviruses.
US President Joe Biden last month ordered US intelligence agencies to report in the next three months on whether Covid-19 emerged from an animal or during a laboratory accident.
Mr Biden revealed two of the 18 intelligence agencies believe in the animal link but that another “leans more toward” the lab theory.
The president said that each of these agencies has “low or moderate confidence” in their stance.
Meanwhile, a bombshell report released by the Wall Street Journal alleged that three staffers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology became ill and had to be hospitalized in November 2019, weeks before China disclosed the outbreak to the world.
Earlier this month a group of leading scientists said the possibility of coronavirus accidentally escaping from the Wuhan lab in China “remains viable.”
In a letter published in the journal Science, 18 researchers from Stanford, Harvard, MIT and Cambridge blasted the WHO and scientists who followed it for failing to consider that there may have been an “accidental” lab escape.
Beijing has strongly denied the lab leak theory and all allegations of a cover-up.
