Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley testifies before the House Armed Services Committee during a hearing on the Fiscal Year 2021 National Defense Authorization Budget Request from the Department of Defense on Capitol Hill in Washington D.C., the United States, on Feb. 26, 2020. (Photo by Ting Shen/Xinhua)

Top U.S. infectious disease expert and health official Anthony Fauci clarified that the current scientific evidence shows it is highly unlikely that the virus was manmade.

"If you look at the evolution of the virus in bats and what's out there now, (the scientific evidence) is very, very strongly leaning toward this could not have been artificially or deliberately manipulated," he noted in an interview published on Monday by National Geographic.

The virus "evolved in nature and then jumped species" as "everything about the stepwise evolution over time" strongly indicated, said Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

During a Senate hearing on Tuesday, Republican Representative John Ratcliffe failed to answer questions on the virus' origins purported by U.S. President Donald Trump, who had nominated him as director of national intelligence, the country's top spy agency.

According to CNN, when Senator Angus King asked Ratcliffe whether he had seen evidence that the virus originated in a lab, he said he had not. When Senator Tom Cotton asked Ratcliffe if he had seen evidence that the virus originated in a Wuhan market, he said he had not.