The former head of Britain's MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove, has said the coronavirus pandemic began as an accident in a Chinese lab.
In an interview with The Telegraph, he said he believes the coronavirus pandemic "started as an accident" when the virus escaped from a laboratory in China.
Moreover, Norwegian scientist Birger Sørensen, the co-author of the British-Norwegian study -- published in the Quarterly Review of Biophysics, has claimed the novel coronavirus Sars-CoV-2 is not natural in origin, reports Forbes.
The study from Sørensen and British Prof Angus Dalgleish showed that the spike protein of coronavirus contains sequences that appeared to be artificially inserted.
They also highlighted the lack of mutation since its discovery, which suggested it was already fully adapted to humans.
The study goes on to explain the rationale for the development of Biovacc-19, a candidate vaccine for Covid-19 that is now in advanced preclinical development.
According to Forbes, Sørensen told NRK, Norwegian government-owned radio and television public broadcasting company, that the virus has properties that differ greatly from Sars, and which have never been detected in nature.
On coronavirus research, he explained, China and the United States have collaborated for many years.
Both countries participate in "gain of function" studies, in which the pathogenicity or transmissibility of potential pandemic pathogens can be enhanced in order to understand them better, claimed Sørensen.
For months, rumours have persisted that the virus was created in the advanced virology lab in Wuhan. Lab bosses told Chinese state television that the claims were "total fabrication" and that the lab had never done any research into viruses similar to Sars-CoV-2.
Sørensen said it was Chinese scientists that first released the sequences that the British-Norwegian study later claimed to have been unnatural in origin.
He claimed China has since put a lid on other such studies.
Former MI6 head backs the research
Sir Richard Dearlove, 75, who was the head of MI6 between 1999 and 2004, said that the research shows the pandemic that wreaked havoc across the world may have started in a lab.
He suggested that a biosecurity failure might have led to the virus escaping during an experiment with bat coronaviruses.
The former MI6 chief said he did not believe the Chinese had released the virus deliberately, but accused Beijing of subsequently covering up the scale of its spread, according to The Telegraph.
"I do think that this started as an accident. It raises the issue, if China ever were to admit responsibility, does it pay reparations? I think it will make every country in the world rethink how it treats its relationship with China and how the international community behaves towards the Chinese leadership."
The Chinese government has always insisted that the outbreak started in a "wet market" in the city of Wuhan in December 2019. But critics have questioned why some early human cases and their contacts appeared to have no connection to the area.
Two laboratories in Wuhan studying bat coronaviruses -- the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the Wuhan Centre for Disease Control -- have been suggested as the possible true sources of the outbreak.
'Significant amount of evidence'
In May, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said there was "a significant amount of evidence" that the new coronavirus emerged from a Chinese laboratory in Wuhan, contradicting a statement issued by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence that said the virus did not appear to be man-made or genetically modified.
British Health Secretary Matt Hancock, in a television interview in May, said: "We don't have any evidence that this is a man-made coronavirus."
Earlier this week, Liu Xiaoming, the Chinese ambassador to the UK, said Beijing would welcome an international investigation into the origins of the pandemic, insisting his country had nothing to hide.
"China's record is clean. It can stand the test of time and history," he said.
According to Worldometer, Covid-19 has claimed 406,207 lives and infected 7,092,919 people across the world till 11:55am on Monday.
As many as 3,462,185 people have recovered from the disease which has spread to 213 countries and territories across the planet.