Some British politicians now think the coronavirus pandemic may have begun after a Chinese laboratory, The Daily Mail reported on Sunday.

“Senior sources in the British government say that while ‘the balance of scientific advice’ is still that the deadly virus was first transmitted to humans from a live animal market in Wuhan, a leak from a laboratory in the Chinese city is ‘no longer being discounted,'” The Mail reported.

One member of Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s emergency committee said last night that while the latest intelligence did not dispute the virus was ‘zoonotic’ – originating in animals – it did not rule out that the virus first spread to humans after leaking from a Wuhan laboratory. The member of the ‘Cobra’ committee, which receives detailed classified briefings from the security services, said: ‘There is a credible alternative view [to the zoonotic theory] based on the nature of the virus. Perhaps it is no coincidence that there is that laboratory in Wuhan. It is not discounted.’

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A recent analysis of SARS-CoV-2 by a group of researchers delivered evidence that the virus is not man made. They compared the genome of the new coronavirus with the seven other coronaviruses known to infect humans and drew a clear conclusion: “Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus,” they wrote in the journal Nature Medicine.

Instead, they offer two scenarios that can explain the origin of SARS-CoV-2: “natural selection in an animal host before zoonotic transfer; and … natural selection in humans following zoonotic transfer.”

But there are other theories that the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 now sweeping the world was created in a lab in Wuhan, China.

“Don’t buy China’s story: The coronavirus may have leaked from a lab,” The New York Post wrote back on Feb. 11.

The story says Chinese leader Xi Jinping “didn’t actually admit that the coronavirus now devastating large swaths of China had escaped from one of the country’s bioresearch labs. But the very next day, evidence emerged suggesting that this is exactly what happened, as the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology released a new directive titled: ‘Instructions on strengthening biosecurity management in microbiology labs that handle advanced viruses like the novel coronavirus.’ …

It turns out that in all of China, there is only one. And this one is located in the Chinese city of Wuhan that just happens to be … the epicenter of the epidemic. That’s right. China’s only Level 4 microbiology lab that is equipped to handle deadly coronaviruses, called the National Biosafety Laboratory, is part of the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

The Mail said “scientists at the institute were the first to suggest that the virus’s genome was 96 per cent similar to one commonly found in bats.”