The U.S. military and intelligence community are investigating the theory that the novel coronavirus may have originated from an accidental contamination from a laboratory in Wuhan, China, rather than from a wet market, as has been widely speculated.

Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, confirmed to reporters on Tuesday that military intelligence was looking into it.

“On the lab piece ... it should be no surprise to you that we’ve taken a keen interest in that, and we’ve had a lot of intelligence take a hard look at that,” Milley said. “And I would just say at this point that it’s inconclusive — although the weight of evidence seems to indicate natural. But we don’t know for certain.”

Josh Rogin, a columnist for the Washington Post, tweeted in response that “many senior officials disagree with Milley and believe the lab origin is much more likely than the seafood market story.”

“There’s a gap in the intel,” Rogin said. “That’s largely because the Chinese government has censored and suppressed all evidence related to the lab.”

The World Health Organization concluded that the COVID-19 virus first appeared in Wuhan, the capital of China’s Hubei province, at the end of 2019, and an investigative report in February found “early cases identified in Wuhan are believed to have acquired infection from a zoonotic source” in the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market.

A Washington Post piece this week reported that U.S. Embassy officials in China warned about biosecurity and management problems at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, China’s first biosafety level 4 lab, which researches infectious diseases — including coronaviruses from bats.

One "sensitive but unclassified" State Department cable warned in January 2018 about problems at the Wuhan lab, located just miles from the Wuhan wet market, to which most but not all of the earliest COVID-19 cases were traced.

“During interactions with scientists at the WIV laboratory, they noted the new lab has a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory,” the cable stated. “Most importantly, the researchers also showed that various SARS-like coronaviruses can interact with ACE2, the human receptor identified for SARS-coronavirus. This finding strongly suggests that SARS-like coronaviruses from bats can be transmitted to humans to cause SARS-like diseases."

“The cable was a warning shot," one U.S. official said, adding that "they were begging people to pay attention to what was going on.”

“The idea that it was just a totally natural occurrence is circumstantial. The evidence it leaked from the lab is circumstantial,” another senior Trump administration official said. “Right now, the ledger on the side of it leaking from the lab is packed with bullet points, and there’s almost nothing on the other side.”

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Concerns have also been raised about the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention, a biosafety level 2 lab that is also in close proximity to the Wuhan wet market.

Defense Secretary Mark Esper hinted Tuesday that the United States might consider regularly sending inspectors into infectious disease research labs similar to how inspectors are sent into nuclear facilities.

“I think that’s something that needs to be looked at after the fact,” Esper said. “There’s going to be, at some point, a 'lessons learned,' if you will, that needs to be conducted — we’ve already begun it, by the way, trying to capture lessons learned so at some point, we can stop and look back and adjust our plans — our global pandemic campaign plans, et cetera. I think that’s probably something to take a look at.”

Republican Sens. Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Ted Cruz of Texas, among others, have speculated that the novel coronavirus may have originated from an accidental lab contamination.

A report by Yahoo News on Tuesday cited nine current and former national security and intelligence officials who confirmed that U.S. spy agencies are also looking into whether the novel coronavirus started as an inadvertent lab escape.

“We are actively and vigorously tracking down every piece of information we get on this topic, and we are writing frequently to update policymakers.” an intelligence official told the outlet. The intelligence community “has not come down on any one theory."

Another intelligence source said, “It’s absolutely being looked at very closely at the highest levels." A former CIA official said that "disaffected Chinese sources" would be of use to U.S. spy agencies if the novel coronavirus is linked to a Chinese lab.

The New York Times reported that Matthew Pottinger, the deputy national security adviser, also suspected the coronavirus may have originated in a Wuhan laboratory.

Richard Ebright, a professor of chemical biology at Rutgers University, told the Washington Examiner, “The first human infection could have occurred as a natural accident, with a virus passing from bat to human, possibly through another animal.” The professor added, “The first human infection also could have occurred as a laboratory accident, with a virus accidentally infecting a laboratory worker.”

The Lancet, a medical journal, published a study from Chinese researchers concluding that most but likely not all early cases of the novel coronavirus could be tied to the Wuhan wet market.

There is well-documented evidence that China tried to cover up the spread of the coronavirus, muzzled whistleblowers, misled the WHO, and attempted to block outside health experts. At least one study indicated that if the Chinese government had acted more quickly, the coronavirus’s global spread would have been greatly reduced.

Reports show that Chinese doctors knew between late December and early January that human-to-human transmission of the coronavirus was almost certainly occurring, and the Chinese government silenced medical professionals who attempted to go public. Yet the WHO tweeted on Jan. 14 that “preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission.”

The U.S. intelligence community also reportedly believes the Chinese Communist Party downplayed the severity of the initial coronavirus outbreak and continues to mislead about the infection rate and death toll inside China.