Army General Mark Milley says the coronavirus outbreak was likely natural but admits 'we can't be certain' after report claimed it was developed in a Wuhan lab that the US oversaw

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The US military believes that the coronavirus likely occurred naturally and was not developed in a Chinese laboratory as some rumors and reports have suggested about the November 2019 outbreak. 

After a Washington Post article on Tuesday, claimed it came from a worker at a bat-testing lab in Wuhan that the US regularly visited, the military addressed it in a media briefing.

'There's a lot of rumor and speculation in a wide variety of media, the blog sites, etc,' Army General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said when asked if there was any evidence the coronavirus may have been developed in a Chinese laboratory.

'It should be no surprise to you that we've taken a keen interest in that and we've had a lot of intelligence take a hard look at that. 

'And I would just say, at this point, it's inconclusive although the weight of evidence seems to indicate natural. But we can't be certain.'

Army General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff addressed a new report that claims the coronavirus outbreak originated in a Wuhan lab the US regularly visited. He said: 'I would just say, at this point, it's inconclusive although the weight of evidence seems to indicate natural. But we can't be certain'

A worker is seen inside the P4 laboratory in Wuhan, capital of China's Hubei province, on February 23, 2017. Tuesday's report mentions that the US Embassy in Beijing 'took the unusual step of repeatedly sending US science diplomats to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV)'. It notes the final visit in March 2018 was recently removed from the website, as was the profile of the alleged patient zero (not pictured)

In the US there have been more than 600,000 COVID-19 cases and at least 25,200 deaths as of Tuesday evening. 

The US has seen the highest numbers of any country in the world.

The Washington Post published an article Tuesday where journalist Josh Rogin reported seeing documents from where the state department indicated it was worried about China's experimentation with bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

According to the article, the US 'dispatched two diplomatic cables categorized as Sensitive But Unclassified back to Washington' which warned about 'safety and management weaknesses'.

'The first cable, which I obtained, also warns that the lab’s work on bat coronaviruses and their potential human transmission represented a risk of a new SARS-like pandemic,' Rogin writes.  

It's reported the US helped China build the labs so they could keep an eye on China's experiments on bat viruses. 

Tuesday's report mentions that in January 2018, the US Embassy in Beijing 'took the unusual step of repeatedly sending US science diplomats to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV)', which had in 2015 become China’s first laboratory to achieve the highest level of international bioresearch safety, but last week WIV deleted a news statement from their website about the final visit to the lab on March 27, 2018. 

The profile of a graduate student believed to be patient zero, was also removed from the site.

U.S. Joint Chiefs Chairman Army Gen. Mark Milley addresses a news conference as Defense Secretary Mark Esper listens at the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia on Thursday

The report states that on December 30, 2019, bat scientist Shi Zhengli, was asked to analyze two virus samples from the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention. They noted the viruses appeared to belong to the SARS family - which also originated in bats - and noted patients were suffering from pneumonia.

Zhengli is reported as saying in an interview with Scientific American: 'Could they have come from our lab?'

Zhengli has since insisted the lab is not the epicenter of the epicenter. Another research scientist isn't so sure.

'I don’t think it’s a conspiracy theory. I think it’s a legitimate question that needs to be investigated and answered,' Xiao Qiang, a research scientist at the School of Information at the University of California at Berkeley told Rogin. 'To understand exactly how this originated is critical knowledge for preventing this from happening in the future.'

China has not been forthcoming about coronavirus details and President Trump recently said the country may not be revealing the whole truth about their rate of COVID-19 infections and deaths.

Earlier this year, three Wall Street Journal journalists were deported after the publication's China Is The Real Sick Man of Asia article title was dubbed racist. The deported journalists were not involved in the report.

Since then, journalists from the New York Times and Washington Post have been removed too. 

State Department warned in 2018 that Wuhan lab testing bats for coronavirus had sloppy safety precautions and had the potential to cause a 'new SARS-like pandemic' 

The US State Department raised concerns over safety issues at the Wuhan research lab studying coronaviruses in animals like bats two years ago, new diplomatic cables reveal.

In 2018 diplomats said there were issues at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), located near the seafood market Chinese authorities claim the virus emerged from, cables obtained by the Washington Post reveal.

A US delegation led by Jamison Fouss, consul general in Wuhan, and Rick Switzer, the Beijing embassy’s counselor of environment, science, technology and health, visited the Wuhan level four biosafety lab multiple times from January to March 2018.

They voiced concern over a lack of safety protocols and the biosafety of the lab's research on coronavirus in animals like bats and warned that if cautionary steps weren't taken, the lab's research could spark a SARS-like outbreak.

They sent two 'sensitive but unclassified cables' back to Washington, DC asking for assistance to help the lab heighten its security measures. 

The institute is located only 20 miles from the food market where it was originally believed that the outbreak began. Experts continue to say the virus was transmitted from animal to human and was not lab engineered in China as some conspiracy theories have claimed 

They warned that a lack of tight safety measures in handing the contagious viruses in the lab 'represented a risk of a new SARS-like pandemic.'

'During interactions with scientists at the WIV laboratory, they noted the new lab has a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory,' a cable dated January 19, 2018 said.

'The cable was a warning shot. They were begging people to pay attention to what was going on,' one US official said.

The cables argued that the United States should give the Wuhan lab further support to help control the situation, but after those messages no extra assistance was provided to those labs.

The US was not only flagged to the activities going on in that laboratory, but they were also prior financially and scientifically involved in their studies.

In 2018 a US delegation visited the Wuhan Institute of Virology (above) several times and sent two cables to Washington DC asking for help to beef its safety and security measures, warning that the lab 'represented a risk of a new SARS-like pandemic'

The WIV received assistance from the Galveston National Laboratory at the University of Texas Medical Branch and other U.S. organizations in its work.

The US National Institute of Health, a government agency, also gave a $3.7million research grant to the WIV to carry out research on bats from caves in Yunnan, more than 1,000 miles away. Scientists have traced the sequencing of the COVID-19 genome to Yunnan, the Mail on Sunday revealed over the weekend. It's not clear when that grant was given.

The Wuhan Institute of Virology had previously published research locating the cluster of bats believed to have transmitted SARS to humans in the 2002 outbreak that infected 8,000.

The lab was also the first to report in February that COVID-19 was derived from bats.

 While the exact source of COVID-19 remains a mystery, scientists and officials say it was transmitted from animals to humans and likely originated in a bat.

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Above shows the number of coronavirus cases and deaths in the US as of Tuesday afternoon, as well as how the rates have changed per day