UK government believes Wuhan lab leak most likely COVID-19 origin: report

The United Kingdom's government is increasingly reassured that the coronavirus pandemic was the result of a lab leak in Wuhan, China, according to a new report. 

While the theory that the coronavirus was leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology was dismissed by world governments early into the pandemic, evidence continues to trickle out supporting the claim. Government officials in the U.K., U.S., and elsewhere have begun voicing support for further investigation into the lab leak possibility. 

Now, sources tell British newspaper the Telegraph that the "official view" within the U.K.'s leadership is that the virus did indeed escape from the Chinese lab, though government officials are more open about that view in private than in public. 

"I think the official view [within Government] is that it is as likely as anything else to have caused the pandemic. A lot of people like myself think it is more likely. I think attitudes have changed a little bit. The zoonotic transfer theory just didn’t make sense," Cambridge bio-security fellow Hamish de-Bretton Gordon told the paper. 

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"There is a huge amount of concern about coming out publicly, but behind closed doors most people think it’s a lab leak. And they are coming round to the fact that even if they don’t agree with that, they must accept it’s likely, and they must make sure the policies are in place to stop it," de-Bretton explained.

Medical professionals in the U.S. have begun walking back their initial dismissal of the lab leak theory, though many continue to emphasize that investigations into the source of the pandemic are a "distraction."

Former National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Francis Collins told Fox News on his last day in office that he's "sorry" the Wuhan lab-leak theory has become such a "huge distraction" for the country, despite there being "no evidence" to support it.

Collins joined "Fox News Sunday" on his last day in office after more than a decade in the agency's top position. The geneticist and physician tapped by President Barack Obama to lead the NIH in 2009 dodged questions about his efforts to discredit the lab-leak theory at the onset of the pandemic, maintaining the most plausible explanation is that the virus spread through animal-to-human transmission.

"I’m really sorry that the lab leak has become such a distraction for so many people because frankly, we still don’t know," Collins told host Bret Baier. 

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U.S. scientists who publicly attributed the COVID-19 pandemic to natural origins rather than human engineering were far less confident in private, transcripts and notes from previous meetings show.

However, conversations between public officials seem to indicate that some experts may have consciously chosen to suppress evidence that could fuel "conspiracists."

"I really can't think of a plausible natural scenario where you get from the bat virus ... to nCoV where you insert exactly four amino acids 12 nucleotide that all have to be added at the exact same time to gain this function," Dr. Robert Garry from Tulane's School of Medicine said, according to notes from a February 2020 meeting released by House Republicans. 

Fox News's Yael Halon contributed to this report.