U.S. Steps Up Claims Covid-19 May Have Escaped From Chinese Lab
- State Department offers no data to back latest assertions
- China has limited or delayed efforts to study virus’s origin
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The State Department on Friday said it had new information suggesting the Covid-19 pandemic could have emerged from a Chinese laboratory and not through contact with infected animals, the latest salvo in the Trump administration’s efforts to pressure Beijing over the virus’s origins.
Specifically, the U.S. said it had obtained new evidence that researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology became sick in the fall of 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak in the surrounding city, with symptoms it said were consistent with either Covid-19 or common seasonal illnesses.