CGTN's Yin Yue discussed conspiracy theories that COVID-19 was released from a lab with Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, Professor at University of California San Francisco School of Medicine, who said new types of infectious diseases emerge all the time and have been a recurring theme for a large part of history. 

He said: "I think conspiracy theories make me very sad because they are distractors... I really don't think it is actually, as an infectious disease doctor... So unless people are making things in a lab over and over again, which I don't think, it is a distraction to think of it as a conspiracy. Instead, we should just rally together and fight it." 

Dr. Chin-Hong added that instead of approaching COVID-19 with unfounded speculations, we should look back on other viruses such as Zika, which also had the ability to be carried by people around the world and to infect others through modern transportation. Hundreds of infections, he said, follow this pattern. 

This explainer came amid numerous rumors circulating on media platforms and even advanced by some Western politicians, that the novel coronavirus may have escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, located in the city where COVID-19 originated. China says there is absolutely no evidence to support such a scenario and says any peddling of such conspiracy theories is "irresponsible."