Available scientific evidence suggests that a new type of coronavirus mutated in the wild without any human intervention, Report says, citing the National Geographic.
According to Anthony Fauci, the director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, if we consider the evolution of the virus in bats and what's out there now, [the scientific evidence] is very, very strongly leaning toward this could not have been artificially or deliberately manipulated …
Everything about the stepwise evolution over time strongly indicates that [this virus] evolved in nature and then jumped species," Fauci says. He also doesn't entertain an alternate theory—that someone found the coronavirus in the wild, brought it to a lab, and then it accidentally escaped.
Fauci is most concerned that the United States will be put to the test this fall and winter by the second wave of COVID-19 if the country does not blunt the infection rate by the summer. "I don't think there's a chance that this virus is just going to disappear," he says. "It's going to be around, and if given the opportunity, it will resurge."
On May 3, US Secretary of State Michael Pompeo said the virus was created artificially. According to him, Washington has evidence that the coronavirus allegedly began to spread from a laboratory in Wuhan, China.
The novel coronavirus (COVID-19) emerged in late 2019 in China's Hubei province, and the virus has spread to 212 countries and territories since then.
On February 11, the WHO officially named the 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) as COVID-19, and on March 11, declared it a pandemic.