Fox News host Tucker Carlson addressed the origins of the coronavirus pandemic and warned viewers to “remain skeptical” of remarks and findings of officials and scientists.

Carlson discussed findings reported in early February by scientists from the South China University of Technology during a monologue on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” Tuesday.

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Carlson noted that neither he nor Fox News had confirmed the claims made by the scientists and we’re not endorsing them, explaining that, at the time the report was published on February 6, China had placed its death toll due to COVID-19 at 564.

“But you should keep in mind as you hear this that these findings come from Chinese scientists who work for a university that is controlled by the Chinese government,” he said, thus they are “probably not Chinese racist propaganda.”

“The virus most likely came from an animal known as the intermediate horseshoe bat,” Carlson said, citing the scientists’ report and noted that “there are no known colonies” of this type of bat “within 900 kilometers of Wuhan,” the city from where the virus is said to have originated.

He added that there is also no evidence that the bats were sold in the Wuhan wet market, “despite many claims made by the American media.” Carlson cited the report which claimed the scientists interviewed those who confirmed the particular bat was not being sold in the wet market but did find nearby laboratories conducting research using the intermediate horseshoe bat.

The South China University scientists concluded that the coronavirus pandemic “likely came” from one of two government labs in Wuhan, the Fox News host continued.

“They noticed that a scientist at the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention had been exposed to the blood and urine of horseshoe bats. They also suggested that infected tissue samples from research animals may have wound up in the Wuhan wet market,” Carlson said, reading a portion of the report which stated:

“The killer coronavirus probably originated from a laboratory in Wuhan. Safety levels may need to be reinforced in high-risk bio-hazardous laboratories and regulations may be taken to relocate these laboratories far away from city centers and other densely populated places.”. . .

“Now this paper’s been online for nearly two months and so far it has been virtually ignored in this country. Almost nobody in American journalism has dared to write about it. The few who have were immediately attacked as dangerous conspiracy theorists,” he said.

“Instead of assessing what seemed like the rational conclusions presented in the Chinese paper, there was a spate of American news stories and academic research designed to show that the coronavirus absolutely could not have been engineered in a Chinese lab,” he continued.

“They sounded supremely confident of that, but do they really know it? And the answer is no they don’t,” Carlson concluded. “As a factual matter, it is impossible for Western scientists to settle the question either way. So instead of doing that or admitting that, they amped up the rhetoric hoping you wouldn’t notice the difference.” . . .