The Trump administration on Friday renewed its efforts to learn the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic in China, issuing a report that suggests researchers inside a Wuhan lab became sickened with the virus weeks or months before the country’s communist leadership reported it started in a food market in that city.
“The U.S. government has reason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV (Wuhan Institute of Virology) became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses,” reads the State Department report. “This raises questions about the credibility of WIV senior researcher Shi Zhengli’s public claim that there was ‘zero infection’ among the WIV’s staff and students of SARS-CoV-2 or SARS-related viruses.”
President Trump and others have since the Chinese Communist Party announced the outbreak Dec. 31, 2019, suspected the virus escaped from the lab.