U.S. President Donald Trump on Thursday said he had seen intelligence reports indicating that coronavirus originated at a laboratory in Wuhan, China.
Asked by a reporter at the White House why he is confident of that assessment, the president replied: “I’m not allowed to tell you that.”
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“There’s a lot of theories,” said Trump, indicating that the intelligence is not definitive. “We’re going to see where it is, we’re going to see where it comes from.”
Asked if he is demanding international inspection of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the president replied: “So far I think China is trying to be somewhat transparent with us.”
Trump added that either China could not stop the coronavirus or China let it spread.
Earlier in the day, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued a statement saying that the U.S. intelligence community “concurs with the wide scientific consensus that the COVID-19 virus was not manmade or genetically modified.”
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It also stated that intelligence agencies “will continue to rigorously examine emerging information and intelligence to determine whether the outbreak began through contact with infected animals or if it was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan.”
The coronavirus was first detected in Wuhan.
So far, COVID-19 has infected nearly 3.3 million people worldwide, killing at least 230,000. The United States has confirmed the most cases, about 1.1 million with about 64,000 deaths.
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