While “the balance of scientific advice” is still that the deadly coronavirus 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” by UK ministers, according to a report in The Mail on Sunday.

One member of Cobra, the emergency committee led by Boris Johnson, said 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 report said.

The member of Cobra, which receives 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.”

The Johnson government is reported to be furious after scientists told the PM China may have downplayed its number of confirmed cases of the coronavirus by an astonishing “factor of 15 to 40 times.”

To say that trust in the regime of Xi Jinping is at an all-time low, would be an understatement.

The £30-million institute, based 16km from the infamous wildlife market, is supposed to be one of the most secure virology facilities in the world, the report said, capable of conducting experiments with highly pathogenic microorganisms such as Ebola.

Scientists at the institute were the first to suggest that the virus’s genome was 96% similar to one commonly found in bats.

But despite its reputation for high security, there have been unverified reports that workers at the institute became infected after being sprayed by blood, and then carried the infection into the local population, the report said.

A second institute in the city, the Wuhan Centre for Disease Control – which is barely 5km from the market — is also believed to have carried out experiments on animals such as bats to examine the transmission of coronaviruses, the report said.

One theory floating around CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., also suggests it was possible a lower paid employee at the lab sold an infected animal to the wet market to make extra money, instead of incinerating it.

American biosecurity expert Professor Richard Ebright, of Rutgers University’s Waksman Institute of Microbiology, New Jersey, said that while the evidence suggests Covid-19 was not created in one of the Wuhan labs, it could easily have escaped from there while it was being analyzed, the report said.

Prof Ebright said he has seen evidence that scientists at the Centre for Disease Control and the Institute of Virology studied the viruses with only “level 2” security — rather than the recommended level 4 – which “provides only minimal protection against infection of lab workers,” the report said.

He concluded that the evidence left “a basis to rule out [that coronavirus is] a lab construct, but no basis to rule out a lab accident.”

Intriguingly, when the wildlife market was closed in January, a report appeared in the Beijing News identifying Huang Yanling, a researcher at the Institute of Virology, as “patient zero” – the first person to be infected.

The claim was described as “fake information” by the institute, which said Huang left in 2015, was in good health and had not been diagnosed with Covid-19.