Came from animals

food security, biosafety, biosecurity — we have a lot of experts in government — will be reviewing this report intensively and quickly,” she said at a daily briefing.

Matthew Kavanagh of Georgetown University said the report deepened the understanding of the virus’s origins, but more information was needed.

“It is clear that the Chinese government has not provided all the data needed and, until they do, firmer conclusions will be difficult,” he said in a statement.

Last year, an AP investigation found the Chinese government was strictly controlling all research into its origins. And repeated delays in the report’s release have raised questions about whether the Chinese side was trying to skew its conclusions.

“We’ve got real concerns about the methodology and the process that went into that report, including the fact that the government in Beijing apparently helped to write it,” US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a recent CNN interview. China rejected that criticism on Monday.

“The US has been speaking out on the report. By doing this, isn’t the US trying to exert political pressure on the members of the WHO expert group?” asked Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian.

Still, suspicion of China has helped fuel the theory that the virus escaped from a lab in Wuhan, the Chinese city where the virus was first identified. The report cited several reasons for all but dismissing that possibility.

It said that such laboratory accidents are rare, that the labs in Wuhan were well-managed and there is no record of viruses closely related to the coronavirus in any laboratory before December

2019.

The report is based largely on a visit by a WHO team of international experts to Wuhan. The mission was never meant to identify the exact natural source of the virus, an endeavour that typically takes years. For instance, more than 40 years of study has still failed to pinpoint the exact species of bat that are the natural reservoir of Ebola.