Chinese authorities have consistently denied that COVID-19 originally leaked from a laboratory in Wuhan. But virologist George Gao, who was then head of the Chinese Institute for Disease Control and responsible for tracing the infection in the country, is not so sure.
"You can always suspect everything. That's science. Don't rule anything out," he said in an interview with BBC Radio 4.
The Chinese government may have taken the theory of the lab leak more seriously than it wanted to make it out to be. According to Gao, some form of formal investigation by the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) has been conducted. The lab, which has studied the coronavirus for years, has been double-checked.
"The government organized something," he says, adding:
"I think their conclusion is that they followed all the protocols. They should not have found anything wrong.