Dr. Robert Redfield, a former director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said recently that he believes the new coronavirus originated inside a laboratory in Wuhan, China, and “escaped”, and was potentially spreading already in September 2019.
“If I were to guess, this virus started to spread somewhere in September, October in Wuhan,” the virologist told CNN in a clip that aired on Friday. “These are my own feelings. And just opinion. I am allowed to have opinions now. “
Although a team from the World Health Organization conducting an investigation into the origins of the virus in Wuhan found the lab-related incident “extremely unlikely”, Redfield said it was “from the point of view that I still find the most likely etiology of this pathogen in Wuhan. was from a laboratory, escaped. ”
“Other people don’t believe that,” said Redfield, who led the CDC under former President Donald Trump. “This is good. Science will eventually find out. It is not uncommon for respiratory pathogens that are being worked on in a laboratory to infect the laboratory worker.”
The WHO team, which has experts from 10 countries, is considering several theories about how the disease ended in humans and is due to release a report with its findings soon. The team’s work should be an initial step in investigating the origins of the virus, which is believed to have originated in bats before being transmitted to humans through another species of wild animal, such as a pangolin or bamboo rat.
Last month, WHO food safety and animal disease expert Peter Ben Embarek said the team’s initial findings “suggest that introduction via an intermediate host species is the most likely route and one that will require more targeted studies and more specific research. “
The possibility of transmission through the trade in frozen products is also likely, he added.
“However, the findings suggest that the hypothesis of laboratory incidents is extremely unlikely to explain the introduction of the virus into the human population,” said Embarek. “Therefore, it is not a hypothesis that we advise to suggest future studies … to understand the origin of the virus.”
Health experts said the new coronavirus probably originated in Wuhan in November 2019. Scientists in the past few months have questioned whether the virus originated in a live animal market in Wuhan or was the result of a laboratory accident in one of the two laboratories of the city – the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the Wuhan Disease Control Centers – which studied coronaviruses originating from bats.