"The COVID-19 virus is most likely to have originated from a laboratory in the Chinese city of Wuhan," according to a report published by the coronavirus subcommittee of the House Oversight Committee of the U.S. Congress.

The legislators cite five arguments in favor of their position, noting that the virus has biological characteristics that have not been found in nature, all cases of COVID-19 allegedly occur due to a single ingestion into the human body, although there were several cases of spread in previous pandemics.

In addition, the congressmen pointed to the presence in Wuhan of a leading research laboratory for the study of SARS viruses, which, according to lawmakers, has a history of research with "inadequate levels of biosafety."

"Researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) contracted a COVID-like virus in the fall of 2019, a few months before COVID-19 was discovered in the wild animal market. By all standards of science, if there were evidence of natural origin, they would have already appeared," the authors of the report concluded.

In September, American and European scientists were able to prove that the focus of the spread of coronavirus was the seafood market in the Chinese city of Wuhan, according to an article published in the American scientific journal Cell.

According to scientists, mammals capable of contracting coronavirus were also sold at the market in Wuhan. These included civets, bamboo rats, and raccoon dogs. From the collected samples, it was found that the animals were indeed infected. At the same time, most of the shops where these animals were illegally sold were located in the western part of the market, where the first cases of the disease were recorded.

On December 31, 2019, the Chinese authorities informed WHO about an outbreak of unknown pneumonia in the city of Wuhan in the central part of the country (Hubei Province). At the same time, the first cases were somehow connected with the local seafood market. In early January 2020, it was officially announced in China that a new type of coronavirus was the cause of an outbreak of viral pneumonia of unknown origin. And on March 11, 2020, WHO head Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that the spread of the new coronavirus is in the nature of a pandemic, reports ria.ru.