--- title: "US Military: Unlikely COVID-19 Was Created in Lab as Bioweapon" description: "A top Pentagon general said during a Tuesday briefing that the \"weight of evidence\" points towards the coronavirus having \"natural\" origins." date: "2020-04-15" modified: "2020-04-15" authors: - name: "Victor Tangermann" job_title: "Senior Editor" link: "https://futurism.com/authors/victor" url: "https://futurism.com/neoscope/us-military-unlikely-covid-19-created-lab-bioweapon" categories: - "Developments" - "Health & Medicine" - "Military" - "Science & Energy" tags: - "china" - "coronavirus" - "covid19" --- # US Military: Unlikely COVID-19 Was Created in Lab as Bioweapon ![A top Pentagon general said during a Tuesday briefing that the "weight of evidence" points towards the coronavirus having "natural" origins.]() *\Image: Governor Tom Wolf via Flickr\* General Mark Milley, a top Pentagon general, said during a Tuesday briefing that the "weight of evidence" points towards the coronavirus having "natural" origins — in other words, it wasn't created in a Chinese laboratory to be used as a bioweapon, as some [conspiracy theories]() suggest. "There’s a lot of rumor and speculation in a wide variety of media, blog sites, etc," Milley told reporters on Tuesday, as [quoted by *The Guardian*](). "It should be no surprise to you that we’ve taken a keen interest in that, and we’ve had a lot of intelligence look at that." "And I would just say at this point, it’s inconclusive, although the weight of evidence seems to indicate natural," he added. "But we don’t know for certain." Some conspiracy theories [spreading through social media]() in China claim that the deadly virus was spread by the US military. Milley's comments came on the same day the *Washington Post* published a [story]() about 2018 state department cables that warned of safety concerns at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), a lab that was at the time studying coronaviruses in bats. Almost two years later, Wuhan became the epicenter of the current coronavirus outbreak. "The cable tells us that there have long been concerns about the possibility of the threat to public health that came from this lab’s research, if it was not being adequately conducted and protected," Xiao Qiang, a research scientist at the School of Information at the University of California at Berkeley, told the *Post*. While there isn't any definitive proof that the current coronavirus originated from bats, most scientists agree that it's a [likely scenario](). The 2018 cables warned that researchers at the Wuhan lab found that "SARS-like coronaviruses from bats can be transmitted to humans to cause SARS-like diseases," as quoted by the *Post*. "From a public health perspective, this makes the continued surveillance of SARS-like coronaviruses in bats and study of the animal-human interface critical to future emerging coronavirus outbreak prediction and prevention." ## Author I've been at Futurism since 2017, where my role has evolved to encompass design, writing, and increasingly editing. I've always been fascinated by space exploration and advanced transportation, which I've leaned into by interviewing luminaries in those fields while closely following the dimensions of policy and regulation that allow next-generation projects to succeed -- or, sometimes, to fail. I'm also keenly interested in the effects of generative AI on society, policies, and democratic institutions, as well as clean energy, physics and biology, and the vagaries of tech leadership. My work for Futurism has been cited by publications including Ars Technica, Gizmodo, PC Magazine, Jalopnik, Fox News, and the New York Post. I spent my childhood living in locations including Manila, the Philippines, and Geneva, Switzerland, attended McGill University, and now live in Toronto, Canada. Before Futurism I worked at AskMen and a small photography studio. In my free time, I'm an avid gardener, foodie, and craft beer lover, as well as a maker of artisanal hot pepper sauces. I have a magnificent dog named Freida. ### Author social links [Bluesky]()