BREAKING: Fox News Reports Coronavirus Originated in Wuhan Laboratory

Fox News has reported that government officials familiar with intelligence on the matter now believe that the Chinese coronavirus escaped from a laboratory, as opposed to coming into existence at a wet food market.

The sources don’t believe coronavirus was created as a weapon, but entered into human transmission at the Wuhan Institute of Virology from a bat. Bats are known to carry a wide reservoir of virus that can’t normally be transmitted to humans, and it is possible that the virus was transmitted from a bat to a pangolin and back again, taking on a form that made it capable of infecting humans.

The sources Fox cites claim that the Wuhan wet food market never actually sold bats, and was scapegoated by the Chinese government in order to deflect scrutiny from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The U.S. Embassy in China had previously warned the State Department about potentially hazardous research into bats and coronaviruses at the facility before.

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, acknowledged the possibility when asked about the prospect of COVID-19 entering into human transmission at a laboratory during a Tuesday press conference.

“It should be no surprise to you that we have taken a keen interest in that and we’ve had a lot of intelligence take a hard look at that. I would just say at this point, it’s inconclusive, although the weight of evidence seems to indicate natural, but we don’t know for certain.”

Anonymous government-linked sources have been wrong before, and it’s hard to conclude decisively if the U.S. government has determined with confidence that the virus entered into human transmission at the Wuhan laboratory. But Fox’s report indicates that government officials are considering the possibility as far more than a fringe conspiracy theory. Liberal media outlets had claimed as such with confidence around the start of the global coronavirus pandemic, blasting Senator Tom Cotton in particular for questioning the Chinese government’s narrative on the origins of the pandemic disease.