President Donald Trump on Thursday said - without offering any evidence - that he has a high degree of confidence that the coronavirus outbreak originated from a laboratory in China.
“I can’t tell you that. I’m not allowed to tell you that,” Trump said at a White House event when asked what evidence he has seen to make him believe that the virus emerged from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. That lab is in the region that saw the first big outbreak of what is now a world-wide pandemic that has infected more than 3.2 million people.
On December 31, 2019, Chinese authorities announced an outbreak of pneumonia in China's Wuhan, the causative agent of which is a new type of coronavirus officially named COVID-19.
On March 11, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the outbreak of a new coronavirus a pandemic.