Claims by a Chinese virologist that Covid-19 was man-made have been debunked by medical experts.
Dr Li Meng-Yan, a researcher at the Hong Kong School of Public Health, had previously accused Beijing of covering up the outbreak in Wuhan.
The whistleblower had said she was among the first people in China to study the pneumonia-like illness after it emerged in eastern China late last year.
But as cases appeared rose exponentially, she claimed she was told to "keep silent and be careful".
Appearing on ITV's Loose Women, Dr Li claimed that she has evidence that the deadly virus was manmade.
But her paper was not peer-reviewed by other experts in the field.
Despite the claims from Dr Li, medical experts worldwide, including the World Health Organisation, strongly agree that the virus began in nature and was not man-made and have debunked such claims.
Gkikas Magiorkinis, Assistant Professor of Hygiene and Epidemiology and Scientific Coordinator of the National Reference Centre for Retroviruses at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, said: “Closely related coronaviruses have been retrieved from animals such as bats and pangolins, which makes the scenario of naturally occurring evolution far more likely than any scenario of laboratory manipulation.
"In fact, we have [a] clear history of zoonotic origin of lethal coronavirus outbreaks such as SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV.
"The paper by Li-Meng et al. does not provide any robust evidence of artificial manipulation, no statistical test of alternative hypotheses (natural evolution vs artificial manipulation) and is highly speculative.”
