There are "questions to be asked" about where coronavirus came from, Boris Johnson's spokesperson has said.
The Government spokesperson told reporters on Wednesday that an investigation would be needed to help stop further similar outbreaks.
Their comments came after US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said there is "a significant amount of evidence" that the virus "came from that laboratory in Wuhan".
And President Donald Trump claimed to have seen evidence from US intelligence agencies that the virus was created in a Chinese laboratory and was created by mistake.
But the No. 10 spokesperson added that they would not comment on intelligence matters.
Defence Secretary Ben Wallace also said that he would not comment on the US allegations - adding that an investigation now would be too soon.
He told the BBC's Today programme; “I think the time for post-mortem into this global pandemic viral spread is for once we all have as much data as possible, the testing around the world produces solid and realistic results about who is infected, how it acts with different people, and also when there’s potentially a vaccine in place....
“By me speculating or talking about what I think about China or anyone else isn’t going to help the fight against coronavirus in the UK right now."
Mr Wallace also said that the slow global response to the virus had caused deaths.
He told the LBC radio station: “It came from the other side of the world and all of us have been learning on the job and I think if we’d known from the outset more about the virus, of course more lives could have been saved.
“But I don’t think it’s a country-by-country problem, I think it is a massive problem around how we share intelligence on viruses and learning at pace. “
Mr Wallace's comments come after fellow Cabinet minister Grant Shapps said that more coronavirus testing in the UK early on could have saved lives.
Asked whether fewer people would have died if testing capacity had been greater sooner, the Transport Secretary told the BBC's Andrew Marr show: "Yes.
"If we had had 100,000 test capacity before this thing started and the knowledge that we now have retrospectively I'm sure many things could have been different."
The origin of coronavirus is still not entirely certain. The Chinese Government account is that it transferred from animals to humans in a "wet market" - a market where live animals are sold - in the city of Wuhan.
But a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that only 45 per cent of the first 425 patients had links to the market.
The majority of scientists who study the virus have rejected the idea that the virus was created in a lab as a "bioweapon".
James Le Duc, the head of the Galveston National Laboratory in the US, told the Guardian: “There is convincing evidence that the new virus was not the result of intentional genetic engineering and that it almost certainly originated from nature, given its high similarity to other known bat-associated coronaviruses,”
