Little new evidence emerges in U.S. COVID-19 origins probe -- reports

People wander near the White House in Washington, D.C., the United States, June 22, 2021.(Xinhua/Liu Jie)

Current intelligence reinforces the belief that the virus most likely originated naturally, from animal-human contact and was not deliberately engineered," reported CNN, quoting sources.

DHAKA, July 20 (Xinhua) -- Little new evidence has emerged in the ongoing investigation into the origins of COVID-19 by the U.S. government, United News of Bangladesh has recently reported, citing a CNN story.

"Current intelligence reinforces the belief that the virus most likely originated naturally, from animal-human contact and was not deliberately engineered," reported CNN, quoting sources.

White House Chief Medical Advisor Anthony Fauci has recently said that he believes the natural origins theory of the novel coronavirus is still "the most likely."

"The most likely explanation is a natural evolution from an animal reservoir to a human," Fauci, also the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases of the United States, told CNN during a recent interview.

Travelers with face masks are seen at the Los Angeles International Airport in Los Angeles, the United States, July 18, 2021. (Xinhua)

Paul Offit, a member of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's vaccine advisory committee, echoed Fauci's remarks.

"I think the chance that this was created by laboratory workers -- that it was engineered -- is zero," Offit told CNN in a separate interview.

Matthew Kavanagh, director of the Global Health Policy &Politics Initiative at Georgetown University, told Rolling Stone, a U.S. magazine, earlier this month that U.S. President Joe Biden's use of the intelligence community and not health officials to conduct a review into the origins of the coronavirus may have already politicized the matter.

"This tells us that this is a political and an intelligence story: not a story mostly about science," Kavanagh said. "And so we should understand the picture in that sense, and not be naive about it. We're in a place where politics is driving people's scientific understanding in a dangerous way."