EU leaders join calls for investigating into origins of COVID-19, amid concern about lab leak

European Union leaders Thursday joined in calls for an investigation into the origins of the COVID-19, amid growing concerns about the virus having possibly leaked from a lab in China.

European Council President Charles Michel and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen urged for the probe one day before the Group of Seven, or G-7, summit of world leaders begins in the United Kingdom.

"We need full transparency," Michel said in the press conference, according to The Hill. "The world has the right to know exactly what happened in order to learn the lessons."

Michel and von der Leyen's call for a probe come amid growing support for the theory that the virus originated from at a virology lab in Wuhan, China. 

Earlier in the pandemic, the theory was dismissed as conspiracy, while Chinese officials said it started, or jumped to humans, at an exotic food market in Wuhan.

Von der Leyen said Thursday the world needs to know the specific origins of the virus and that investigators need "complete access to whatever is necessary to really find the source of this pandemic."

 

A team of World Health Organization researchers earlier this year visited the lab but left with little information or hard data to yield any significant findings. 

"We have to know where did it come from in order to draw the right lessons and to develop the right tools to make sure that this will never happen again," von der Leyen said.