Screenshot from NBC News wedsite

Scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) once again strongly refuted conspiracy theories that the novel coronavirus originated from the lab in interviews with NBC News that took place inside the institute.

On Friday, NBC News became the first foreign news organization to be granted access to the institute since the COVID-19 outbreak began, visiting the lab and meeting with scientists who had been working on the origin of the coronavirus.

Yuan Zhiming, vice director of the institute, reiterated that scientists at the facility obtained their first samples of the coronavirus after the disease had begun to spread among the public.

"I have repeatedly emphasized that it was on December 30 that we got contact with the samples of SARS-like pneumonia or pneumonia of unknown cause sent from the hospital," Yuan said. "We have not encountered the novel coronavirus before that, and without this virus, there is no way that it is leaked from the lab."

Wang Yanyi, director of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, said it is unfortunate that she and her colleagues had been targeted as a scapegoat for the origin of the virus.

"Any person would inevitably feel very angry or misunderstood being subject to unwarranted or malicious accusations while carrying out research and related work in the fight against the virus," she said, urging that politics not cloud investigations into how the coronavirus spilled over into humans.

Wang said that none of the institute's scientists contracted the virus, which she said made it extremely unlikely that the pathogen could have escaped from the facility.

Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance, a New York City-based nonprofit dedicated to studying and preventing pandemics, worked with the Wuhan institute for 16 years until the U.S. government cut funding this year. He also rejected the idea that the virus could have leaked from the lab.

"The fact that they published the sequence so quickly suggests to me that they weren't trying to cover up anything," he said. There is "absolutely zero evidence that it escaped from a lab."