A Chinese virologist claims she has proof coronavirus was manufactured in a laboratory.
Doctor Li-Meng Yan, a scientist who conducted some of the earliest research on COVID-19, made the claim during an interview on British talk show Loose Women.
She insisted that reports the virus originated in a wet market was a “smokescreen”.
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“It comes from the lab, the lab in Wuhan and the lab is controlled by China’s government,” she said, citing her source as “local doctors”.
“The first thing is the market in Wuhan ... is a smokescreen.
“This virus is not from nature.”
Yan earlier claimed she was told to keep quiet on the possibility of human-to-human transmission of COVID-19 back in December.
Former supervisors at the Hong Kong School of Public Health, she says, silenced her when she tried to sound the alarm.
She left Hong Kong for America in April.
Her next plan, she says, is to release genomic sequencing that she claims will trace the virus back to a lab.
“The genome sequence is like a human fingerprint,” she said.
“So based on this you can identify these things. I use the evidence … to tell people why this has come from the lab in China, why they are the only ones who made it.”
China has repeatedly claimed COVID-19 may not have originated in Asia at all.
In July, it pointed the finger at Spain, saying wastewater testing there found traces of the virus in March 2019.