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Foreign affairs expert Gordon Chang told "Tucker Carlson Tonight" Wednesday that it is "probable" that the coronavirus pandemic originated in a laboratory in Wuhan, China, not in one of the city's wet markets.

"There was an article in The Lancet, which is the authoritative British medical journal, I think it was posted January 24, which said about a third of the initial cases had no connection with the Wuhan market that everyone talked about," Chang said. "That means that there had to be another source for this, and when you look at Wuhan, obviously that Wuhan Institute of Virology, is at the top of the list of suspects."

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"China reopened wet markets about a week ago," Chang added. "And that's a real indication that Beijing thought -- that Beijing knew -- that the wet markets were not the source of the coronavirus epidemic."

Fox News reported Wednesday that U.S. officials are increasingly confident that COVID-19 likely originated in a Wuhan laboratory not as a bioweapon, but as part of China's effort to demonstrate that its efforts to identify and combat viruses are equal to or greater than the capabilities of the United States.

Multiple sources who have been briefed on the details of early actions by China's government and seen relevant materials spoke with Fox News, with one source saying Beijing may have engaged in the "costliest government coverup of all time."

Chang told host Tucker Carlson that the pandemic should lead America's leaders to "question their assumptions" about the Communist country.

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"I think what this really says is that all of our policymakers, all of our analysts, our academics really need to go back and question their assumptions about what happened and in a general way their view of China," Chang said. "Because clearly we have been getting it wrong for a long time. And now this has had consequences which are just disastrous. We are going to bury many Americans because of this."

Fox News' Gregg Re and Bret Baier contributed to this report.