Covid leaked out of a laboratory in America rather than China, it has been sensationally claimed.
Famous US economist Jeffrey Sachs, who led a two-year probe into the pandemic’s origins, said he was ‘pretty convinced’ the virus was the result of ‘US lab biotechnology’.
The claim, made at a global conference last month, has been seized upon by Chinese Government officials who said it warranted a ‘thorough investigation’.
Professor Sachs, who was twice named one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world, admitted ‘we don’t know for sure’.
‘But there’s enough evidence that it should be looked into and it’s not being investigated — not in the US, not anywhere.’
He added: ‘I think for real reasons, they [US officials] don’t want to look under the rug too much.’
Critics have previously described Professor Sachs as a President Xi ‘propagandist’, dismissing China’s genocide of Uighurs and publicly calling for US cooperation.
China has faced its own accusations of covering up the origins of Covid.
Scientists were found to have wiped crucial databases and stifled independent investigations into a lab just miles away from the pandemic’s ground zero.
The virus first began spreading from a wet market in Wuhan, about eight miles from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) which worked with dangerous coronaviruses.
Researchers who fell ill with a mysterious flu-like virus months before the official Covid timeline were silenced or disappeared.
Professor Sachs is the chairman of the Lancet Covid-19 Commission, set up at the start of the pandemic to assist governments and scrutinise responses.
He oversaw a 12-man taskforce investigating Covid’s origins that was shut down in September 2021 when it emerged the team had financial links to the WIV.
The celebrity economist has said previously he believes the pandemic was the result of experiments done between Chinese and American scientists.
But until now, claims the virus was created in the US were confined to Chinese disinformation campaigns.
