A US intelligence report has questioned the origins of the coronavirus pandemic.
The report has shed light on whether the virus was the result of a natural spillover from animals to humans or was caused by a laboratory accident.
A summary of the report is expected to be published in the coming days.
The report was carried out at the request by US President Joe Biden.
The report appears to dismiss the possibility that the virus might have leaked accidentally from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which has studied coronaviruses in bats for more than a decade.
However, China has strongly rejected this conclusion.
China’s foreign minister has dismissed the report as “anti-science”.
Wang Yi said Washington had “ignored and abandoned” research carried out by the World Health Organization (WHO) for a report that would only service its “political purposes”.
The pandemic, which has claimed more than four million lives around the world, began in the Chinese city of Wuhan in December 2019.
COVID-19 Is Not Over
Menawhile, the World Health Organization (WHO) has warned governments worldwide to ease COVID-19 restrictions too soon.
The UN health agency’s top emergency expert Mike Ryan warned of a new wave of infections. He said the pandemic has just started for much of the world.
He also warned countries that did so “risked paying a heavy price for rushing back to normality.”
“All of the countries of the Americas, we still have nearly one million cases a week,” he said. “And the same in Europe…with half a million cases a week. It’s not like this thing has gone away,” Ryan added. “It isn’t over.”
This came as Britain declared a plan to ease the coronavirus restrictions further.