The former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention claimed in an interview with CNN on Friday that he believes COVID-19 to have originated in a Wuhan lab, New York Post reports.
"I'm of the point of view that I still think the most likely etiology of this pathology in Wuhan was from a laboratory — escaped," said Dr. Robert Redfield. "Other people don’t believe that. That’s fine. Science will eventually figure it out."
Redfield served as director of the CDC in the second half of former President Donald Trump's presidential term, including during the height of the coronavirus pandemic.
Redfield stressed that the view expressed is simply his "opinion" and that the origin of the virus has not yet been confirmed by researchers.
The claim that coronavirus came from a Wuhan lab, namely the Wuhan Institute of Virology, has spread since the disease first emerged in late 2019. The institute is the only biosafety level 4 (BSL-4) laboratory in all of China. BSL-4 labs are used to study deadly diseases which can easily infect humans and for which there is no known cure.
Many scientists and researchers have heavily disputed the claim, however, pointing mainly to a lack of evidence. The World Health Organization has said that the possibility that the disease leaked from the Wuhan lab is "extremely unlikely." Most researchers believe that the virus originated in a wild bat population before jumping to humans.
Redfield noted that even if the disease did originate from the Wuhan lab, that does not necessarily mean it was intentionally released.
"It's not unusual for respiratory pathogens that are being worked on in a laboratory to infect the laboratory worker… That's not implying any intentionality," he said. "It's my opinion, right? But I am a virologist. I have spent my life in virology."
Redfield, explaining his position, pointed to the virality of coronavirus, arguing that it is uncommon for diseases that suddenly jumped to humans to be as well-adapted for human-to-human transmission as coronavirus is.
"I do not believe this somehow came from a bat to a human and at that moment in time, that the virus came to the human, became one of the most infectious viruses that we know in humanity for human-to-human transmission," he said.
According to Redfield, it typically "takes a while for it to figure out how to become more and more efficient in human-to-human transmission.
"I just don't think this makes biological sense," he said.
He also suggested that the virus may have actually emerged earlier than initially reported, possibly as early as September of 2019.
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