White House trade adviser Peter Navarro said Sunday that “it’s incumbent on China to prove” that a laboratory in Wuhan played no role in the coronavirus outbreak.

The trade adviser said on “Sunday Morning Futures” that he thinks “the simplest explanation” that the laboratory started the outbreak is “most likely,” adding the lab is “within a few miles” of “the ground zero” for coronavirus.

“If you simply do an Occam's razor approach that the simplest explanation is probably the most likely, I think it's incumbent on China to prove that it wasn't that lab,” he said during his interview.

Navarro criticized China for using “its influence” at the World Health Organization (WHO) “to hide the virus from the world.”

“This was a time where that virus could have been contained in Wuhan,” he said. “Instead, 5 million Chinese people went out from Wuhan and propagated the virus around the world.”

The trade adviser has also accused the country where the virus originated of importing and hoarding personal protective equipment.

“And what that did was leave people in New York, Milan, and everywhere in between defenseless when it came time to have that PPE,” he said.

The laboratory – the Wuhan Institute of Virology – has denied producing the coronavirus that has rocked the world, with the vice director Yuan Zhiming calling the allegations a “conspiracy theory.”

CNN reported last week that U.S. officials have been investigating the possibility of the virus originating in the Chinese lab.

Also last week, the president announced he was stopping funds to WHO until an investigation into their management of the pandemic was conducted.

Trump and his administration have pointed blame at WHO and China for not being transparent enough during the early days of the pandemic. The coronavirus has infected at least 2,374,141 people and has killed at least 163,372 worldwide, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.