{"id":254097,"date":"2020-05-06T20:37:14","date_gmt":"2020-05-07T00:37:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/?p=254097"},"modified":"2020-05-07T23:12:08","modified_gmt":"2020-05-08T03:12:08","slug":"covid-19-natural-and-not-man-made-us-military-chief","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/2020\/05\/06\/covid-19-natural-and-not-man-made-us-military-chief\/","title":{"rendered":"Covid-19 ‘natural and not man-made’ : US military chief"},"content":{"rendered":"
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“The weight of evidence is that it was natural and not man-made,” Milley told reporters at the Pentagon. (File Photo: Macau Photo Agency\/Unsplash)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

WASHINGTON<\/strong>\u00a0\u2013 US Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark Milley said Tuesday that the “weight of evidence” shows the coronavirus pandemic points towards natural origins.<\/p>\n

“The weight of evidence is that it was natural and not man-made,” Milley told reporters at the Pentagon.<\/p>\n

The top general’s remarks came days after President Donald Trump said he had seen evidence that gave him a “high degree of confidence” that Covid-19 came from a lab in the Chinese city of Wuhan. Yet the president said he was not allowed to discuss it.<\/p>\n

On the same day, Trump contradicted the Office of the Directorate of National Intelligence, which said the intelligence community “concurs with the wide scientific consensus that the Covid-19 virus was not man-made or genetically modified.”<\/p>\n

Milley said the Pentagon does not have conclusive evidence that the virus was intentionally released, “but the weight of evidence is that it was probably not intentional.”<\/p>\n

He also said the Pentagon does not know where the virus originated, be it in a Wuhan lab, the wet market there or somewhere else, and civilian and US government agencies are looking at the issue.<\/p>\n

“It would help a great deal if the Chinese government would open up and allow inspectors and investigators to go there,” he added.<\/p>\n

As of Tuesday, more than 71,000 people in the US had died and over 1.2 million are infected by Covid-19, the respiratory disease caused by the virus, according to data being compiled by Johns Hopkins University.\u00a0(Anadolu)<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

WASHINGTON\u00a0\u2013 US Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark Milley said Tuesday that the “weight of evidence” shows the coronavirus …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":252819,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54365,16,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-254097","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-instagram","category-news","category-news-w","mauthors-anadolu","mauthors-philippine-news-agency"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/254097","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=254097"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/254097\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":254098,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/254097\/revisions\/254098"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/252819"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=254097"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=254097"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=254097"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}