US Congressman Jim Himes (Reuters)

US Congressman Jim Himes stated on Tuesday that China should be forthcoming in getting to the bottom of whether a laboratory leak caused the coronavirus outbreak, admitting that there are facilities in the United States that operate with "terribly dangerous" viruses.

"If it turns out to have been a lab leak, we need to really understand how that happened, and the Chinese certainly do because it cannot happen again, and, by the way, we have labs that handle terribly, terribly dangerous viruses too. So, there's a lot of learning that could occur if we got to the truth. To get to the truth, we're going to need the Chinese to be forthcoming," Himes said.

In February, the US Energy Department, alongside the FBI, claimed that the COVID-19 pandemic emerged from a test tube in a laboratory in Wuhan, China, referring to the leak as an accident caused by a potential mishap at the lab.

It is worth noting that the United States did not give the World Health Organization (WHO) access to reports or data that accuse a Chinese laboratory of causing Covid-19, head of the Emerging Diseases and Zoonoses Unit within the WHO's Health Emergencies Programme Maria Van Kerkhove said on Friday, March 3.

Reps charge at Fauci for ‘disproving’ Coronavirus lab leak theory

Republican lawmakers have accused former US chief medical advisor Anthony Fauci of requesting a publication meant to disprove the hypothesis that the SARS-CoV-2 virus leaked from a laboratory in China, as per a recent report from the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Epidemic Majority Staff.

"New evidence released by the Select Subcommittee today suggests that Dr. Fauci ‘prompted’ the drafting of a publication that would ‘disprove’ the lab leak theory, the authors of this paper skewed available evidence to achieve that goal," the memo said, as reported by Fox News on Sunday.

According to the memo, Fauci was informed about the danger of COVID-19 allegedly leaking from a lab in Wuhan, China, during a phone discussion with numerous scientists in February 2020.

Despite this, "Fauci 'prompted' Dr. Kristian Andersen, Professor, Scripps Research (Scripps), to publish [a paper titled 'The] Proximal Origin [of SARS-CoV-2'] and that the purpose was to 'disprove' any lab leak explanation," as per the document.

As part of the select subcommittee probe, Republican lawmakers re-requested evidence from the Biden administration on the origins of the COVID-19 epidemic in February. They also requested a confidential briefing on the subject from the US intelligence community.

This comes shortly after a report published by the Global Times on Sunday disclosed frustrations among World Health Organization (WHO) senior experts due to the US reluctance to disclose more information on the origins of the Coronavirus.