Anthony Fauci, the top expert on infectious disease in the United States, rejected on Friday a conspiracy theory claiming that the novel coronavirus was made in a lab.

"A group of highly-qualified evolutionary virologists looked at the sequences in bats as they evolve," Fauci said during a press briefing at the White House. "The mutations that it took to get to the point where it is now is totally consistent with a jump of a species from an animal to a human."

The remarks of Fauci, directer of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a key member of the White House coronavirus task force, came as some U.S. politicians and media outlets are pushing the conspiracy theory that the virus escaped from a Chinese lab despite lack of hard evidence.

In a study published in Nature Medicine in March, researchers said "they do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible."

The study, led by Kristian Andersen, a computational biologist at Scripps Research in California, compared the novel coronavirus, or SARS-CoV-2, to the six other coronaviruses known to infect humans.

"Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus," the study said. 

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