No evidence of lab origin of COVID-19 in US

There is currently no evidence that the coronavirus began spreading around the world following a laboratory leak in China, but this possibility should not be ruled out entirely, Director of National Institutes of Health Dr. Francis Collins said in an interview with Fox News, Report informs.

Collins replied that any references to "conspiracy theories" in the emails were meant to describe more colorful claims like that of China purportedly using a virus as part of an "engineered bioweapon."

"That doesn't fit with what we know about this particular viral genome. Another was that NIH had somehow been complicit in the generation of this dangerous virus. And I can tell you categorically that did not happen," he said.

"Then there was this other idea that maybe it was an accident lab leak, that the institute had been studying this virus that had happened somehow in nature and it got loose," Collins continued. "I never rejected that one, although there was no evidence to support it."

Collins did assert that the theory needs more proof, saying, "Even the lab leak hypothesis, you know, Carl Sagan had this famous statement that ‘extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence’," Collins said.

Earlier, The Wall Street Journal, citing a US intelligence report, reported that three employees of the Wuhan Institute of Virology fell seriously ill in November 2019, before the first reports of a novel coronavirus appeared. According to the publication, the intelligence report adds weight to Washington's calls to further investigate the version of a possible leak of coronavirus from a Chinese laboratory.