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Pompeo says there’s ‘significant amount of evidence’ COVID-19 originated in a lab in China

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Mike Pompeo

US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, has ended weeks of conflicting rhetorics with regards to the origins of the coronavirus after he claimed on Sunday that there was ‘ernormous evidence’ COVID-19 originated in a Chinese laboratory.

In an interview with ABC’s This Week, Pompeo said: “I can tell you that there is a significant amount of evidence that this came from that laboratory in Wuhan”, but did not provide any of the alleged evidence.

The Secretary’s claims had at some point been patchy. He had made statements suggesting that the Sars-CoV-2- virus was deliberately developed or had escaped from a lab in China only for the US intelligence to issue a formal statement noting the opposite to which he said: “That’s right. I agree with that.”

Donald Trump had also made a similar statement on Thursday, saying he was privy to evidence that the pandemic began in a Chinese lab not from a Wuhan livestock market as Beijing had claimed.

The Chinese authorities have still kept their doors shut to foreign experts and investigators from the World Health Organization wanting to investigate the origins of the virus. They have restricted samples of animals at the Wuhan livestock market where they claim the outbreak began from being shared.

READ ALSO: North and South Korea exchange fire hours after Kim Jong-un appears

Meanwhile, Johns Hopkins University has confirmed 66,000 deaths and 1,134,507 coronavirus cases in the United States with a global figure of nearly 3.5 million confirmed cases and more than 245,000 deaths.

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