" The World Health Organization’s initial investigation into the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic found little reason to believe the virus leaked from a Chinese biolab, but didn’t outright dismiss the idea, either. Nonetheless, anti-China figures have continued to push the theory as being equal in validity to others, like zoonotic transfer. " ........"Their report, published by the Italian National Cancer Institute in its magazine Tumori Journal, found that 111 of 959 samples in the trial showed the unique spike protein SARS-CoV-2 uses to infect cells in the human body were present in the patient’s blood, and that tests of other similar coronaviruses were negative. That would mean that the patients had contracted and recovered from COVID-19 by the time of the October blood tests, signaling that COVID-19 was circulating in northern Italy in September 2019 - six months before the first cases were detected in Milan in February 2020."....................."However, even if a milder COVID-19 infection was circulating in China earlier in 2019, it would still seem to disprove the once-discredited theory, now revived by the Biden administration, that SARS-CoV-2 escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. As Sputnik has reported, the theory was spread by former US President Donald Trump and right-wing anti-China figures close to him in early 2020 as the pandemic spiraled out of control in the US and his administration began looking for someone else to blame for it." ........https://sputniknews.com/europe/20210...-origins-hunt/