Top UK Minister highlights theory that COVID-19 could be 'man made'

UK Levelling Up Minister Michael Gove on Tuesday pointed to a "significant body of judgement" that COVID-19 could have been "man made" amid still ongoing investigations into the origin of the global pandemic.

Gove made the remarks to the government's official inquiry into the COVID-19 pandemic while defending the government's response to the virus, Politico reported. 

The UK minister highlighted the virus's "novel" nature in explaining London's difficulties combating the pandemic, saying "We were not as well prepared as we should have been ideally, that is true. Again, it’s in the nature of the fact that the virus was novel."

"And indeed, though I think this probably goes beyond the remit of the inquiry, there is a significant body of judgment that believes that the virus itself was man made — and that presents its own set of challenges as well," he continued.

While Gove did not go into great detail, the notion that COVID-19 was the product of human research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China and leaked from the facility has increasingly gained traction in official circles, including branches of the United States government.

"It's an admission that came about three years too late," Senator Ron Johnson, R-Wis., said regarding Gove's claims. "You know, there is a mountain of evidence."

Professor Emeritus of Epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health, Dr. Harvey Risch, also said that this was a manufactured virus. 

"We know that this was a human manufactured virus," Risch said on the Tuesday edition of the "Just the News, No Noise" TV show. "We just don't know, literally, that it was released from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but we think it was."

Ben Whedon is an editor and reporter for Just the News. Follow him on X, formerly Twitter.