British PM Johnson says he doesn’t believe COVID-19 escaped from a lab – CBC News
6672 Mins Read
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson says he does not believe the COVID-19 virus escaped from a Chinese lab in Wuhan province but is keeping an eye on new evidence as it emerges.
“I’ve got an open mind on this, but I’ll be clear with you — so far, the stuff I’ve seen does not suggest that the … number one candidate for this is a lab leak,” Johnson told CBC News chief political correspondent Rosemary Barton in an exclusive Canadian interview airing Sunday on Rosemary Barton Live.
Search for origin of COVID-19 ‘poisoned by politics’, says WHO expert
The World Health Organization’s (WHO) top emergency expert said on Friday the search for the origin of the coronavirus was being “poisoned by politics”, days after U.S. President Joe Biden ordered aides to find answers.
Since the virus outbreak that emerged in the central Chinese city of Wuhan in December 2019, scientists have been trying to solve the puzzle of where the virus originated.
“We would like for everyone out there to separate, if they can, the politics of this issue from the science. This whole process is being poisoned by politics,” Mike Ryan told reporters.
A WHO-led team spent four weeks in and around Wuhan with Chinese researchers and said in a report in March that the virus had probably been transmitted from bats to humans through another animal.
It said that “introduction through a laboratory incident was considered to be an extremely unlikely pathway”.
But many politicians and a number of scientists are not satisfied.
