A senior World Health Organisation official has insisted the coronavirus is “natural in origin” after Donald Trump claimed to have seen evidence that the outbreak originated from a laboratory in China.

The Organisation’s Head of emergencies, Dr Michael Ryan said WHO teams have listened “again and again” to many scientists who have looked at the gene sequences and the virus, “and we are assured that this virus is natural in origin”.

He also said it was important to establish the natural host of the virus, which could help pave the way for a better understanding of it and ways to prevent and respond to future outbreaks.

On Thursday, Mr Trump suggested he was confident that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was the origin of the coronavirus, before again criticising the WHO’s early response to the outbreak.

The US president speculated that China could have unleashed Covid-19 on the world due to some kind of horrible “mistake”.

It comes as his intelligence agencies said they are still examining a notion put forward by the president and aides that the pandemic may have resulted from an accident at a Chinese lab.

The Chinese government said that any claims that the coronavirus was released from a laboratory are “unfounded and purely fabricated out of nothing”.