Live: Coronavirus daily news updates, June 10: What to know today about COVID-19 in the Seattle area, Washington state and the world 

The British government plans to burn billions of pounds (dollars) in unusable personal protective equipment purchased in haste during the coronavirus pandemic, a public spending watchdog said Friday.

The idea of burning the face masks, gowns and other equipment to generate power has not impressed the watchdog committee. The panel is investigating how the government came to spend 4 billion pounds ($5 billion) on protective gear that has to be dumped because it is defective or does not meet U.K. standards.

Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee said the government planned to dispose of 15,000 pallets a month of the gear “via a combination of recycling and burning to generate power.”

Pat Cullen, chief executive of the Royal College of Nursing, a professional body, accused the government of “sending billions of pounds up in smoke.”

The Department of Health said only about 670 million pounds’ ($835 million) worth of the PPE was “unusable in any context.” It said some of the excess stock would be repurposed for use by dentists or donated to charities, transport agencies and other countries.

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China on Friday attacked the theory that the coronavirus pandemic may have originated as a leak from a Chinese laboratory as a politically motivated lie, after the World Health Organization recommended in its strongest terms yet that a deeper probe is needed into whether a lab accident may be to blame.

Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian also rejected accusations that China had not fully cooperated with investigators, saying it welcomed a science-based probe but rejected any political manipulation.

He also reiterated calls for an investigation into “highly suspicious laboratories such as Fort Detrick and the University of North Carolina” in the United States where China has suggested, without evidence, that the U.S. was developing the coronavirus as a bioweapon.

“The lab leak theory is totally a lie concocted by anti-China forces for political purposes, which has nothing to do with science,” Zhao said at a daily briefing.

“We always supported and participated in science-based global virus tracing, but we firmly opposed any forms of political manipulation,” he said, repeating China’s long-standing explanation for delaying or rejecting further investigations into the virus’s origins.

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This 2020 electron microscope image made available by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases shows a Novel Coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 particle… (NIAID / NIH via AP, file)More Skip AdBy Carey GoldbergBloomberg

Babies whose mothers caught COVID-19 during pregnancy faced nearly double the risk of being diagnosed with delayed speech or motor skills by their first birthday, according to a study of medical records.

While the risk of developmental delays was low overall, it rose to about 6% among babies who were exposed to COVID in the womb, while unexposed infants’ risk was about 3%, according to findings released Thursday in the journal JAMA Network Open. The lags were seen in behaviors such as rolling over, reaching for objects or babbling — basic milestones of infancy.

COVID has already been shown to affect a wide variety of the body’s systems and organs, including the lungs, heart and nerves. The study of electronic health records from more than 7,000 obstetric patients at Massachusetts hospitals, including those of 222 pregnant patients with COVID, along with their children’s, is another indication of the pandemic’s potential long-lasting impact.

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