US agencies Wuhan | Reports of COVID’s first infections report Coronavirus pandemic News

U.S. intelligence agencies are examining reports that researchers at China’s virology lab were seriously ill in 2019, months before the first COVID-19 cases were reported, U.S. government sources said the origin of the disease has yet to be proven. laboratory.

A U.S. intelligence report still classified in the administration of former President Donald Trump reported that in November 2019 three researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology became very ill, seeking hospital care, sources who report and analyze U.S. intelligence told Reuters.

It was not yet known if these investigators were hospitalized or what symptoms they had, one of the sources said, as everyone spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said on Monday that it was “completely false” that three members of the Wuhan laboratory had become ill. The virus first appeared in Wuhan (China) and then spread around the world.

“We don’t have enough information to draw conclusions about the origin [of the coronavirus]”White House press secretary Jen Psaki said in a statement on Monday.

“We need data. We need independent research. And that’s what we call it, ”Psaki said.

Information about the researchers was published in the Wall Street Journal on May 23.

In a report co-authored with Chinese scientists in March, a team from the World Health Organization (WHO) he spent four weeks in and around Wuhan in January and February they said the virus was probably infected bats to humans through another animal, and that “access through a laboratory accident was considered a very difficult route.”

The U.S. intelligence community “has not ruled out a single theory,” a U.S. source said. Information about the November infections among Wuhan Institute staff “cannot be ruled out,” the source added.

The hypothesis that the virus escaped from the Chinese lab has been promoted on some conservative websites and by some Republicans in Congress. U.S. intelligence agencies have not made a decision.

The U.S. State Department released a “tab” at the COVID-19 and Wuhan lab on Jan. 15, 2020, five days before Trump left office, based in part on information in a classified report, sources said.

The Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency and the defense intelligence components contributed to the public tab and the classified report, sources said. Both met in the offices of the director of National Intelligence.

The report, classified by current U.S. government agencies, experts investigating the origins of COVID-19, and officials in the administration of President Joe Biden, is considered valid.

“We continue to have serious questions about the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, including the origins of the People’s Republic of China,” a White House National Security Council spokesman said.

In a report last week on the origin of COVID-19, Republican members of the intelligence committee of the U.S. House of Representatives confirmed that there is “significant circumstantial evidence” suggesting that COVID-19 was “likely to leak” from the Wuhan laboratory.

Among these evidences, the report contained information indicating that “several researchers” had symptoms of COVID-19 at the end of 2019.

Wang Yanyi, head of the laboratory in Wuhan, told Chinese state television CGTN that in May 2020 there were US claims “Pure manufacturing“.

The WHO, which opened its annual ministerial meeting on May 24, has not announced a follow-up to the Wuhan mission but Member States may raise concerns. U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra will address the week-long forum on Tuesday.