'No Evidence Coronavirus Was Made in a Chinese Lab' Fauci Says

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Director Anthony Fauci Monday reiterated that there is no scientific evidence to claim that the SARS-CoV coronavirus was created in a laboratory. His statement contradicts again the theory on the origin of COVID-19 defended by the U.S. President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

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"If you look at the evolution of the virus in bats and what's out there now, [the scientific evidence] is very, very strongly leaning toward this could not have been artificially or deliberately manipulated," Fauci said in an interview with National Geographic

"Everything about the stepwise evolution over time strongly indicates that [this virus] evolved in nature and then jumped species," the U.S. government's leading epidemiologist added.

His statements are in line with those set forth by the World Health Organization (WHO), a United Nations agency that ratified on Monday that the coronavirus is of animal origin. "The coronavirus circulates ancestrally between bats.

"That is something we know based on this virus's genetic sequence. What we need to understand is which animal... was infected by bats and transmitted it to humans," the WHO Emerging Diseases Department Director Maria Van Kerkhove said.

Nevertheless, Trump insists that the U.S. government has evidence that the virus was created in a laboratory in Wuhan (China), something that the Intelligence Directorate also rejected.

On Tuesday morning, the U.S. president also reacted angrily to a video titled "Mourning In America" produced by The Lincoln Project (LP), a conservative group opposed to Trump's reelection which blames him for mishandling the COVID-19 pandemic.

"There’s mourning in America - and under the leadership of Donald Trump, our country is weaker, sicker, and poorer,” the LP video points out and adds that the United States is on the brink of a new Great Depression.

In response to the above, Trump released his discomfort by calling the Lincoln Project members "losers."​​​​​​​