Ex-US Disease Control Chief Says He Thinks COVID-19 Escaped From Lab

WASHINGTON (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 27th March, 2021) Former US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Robert Redfield on Thursday said he believes the COVID-19 virus escaped from a Chinese laboratory.

"I still think the most likely etiology of this pathology in Wuhan was from a laboratory [and it] escaped," Redfield told CNN. "Other people don't believe that. That's fine. Science will eventually figure it out."

China has repeatedly denied allegations that the virus came from a lab while the the World Health Organization (WHO) said the published genomic sequence proves its of natural origin.

Redfield's theory backs what the Trump administration claimed for months during the height of the pandemic. Then-President Donald Trump repeatedly referred to COVID-19 as the "China virus."

Redfield, who served as CDC chief under the Trump administration, said he was "not implying any intentionality" and reiterated that it was his "opinion."

The former CDC chief said he thinks the virus started transmitting somewhere in September and October of 2019, months before it became a global pandemic in March of 2020.

"I am a virologist," he continued. "I have spent my life in virology. I do not believe this somehow came from a bat to a human and at that moment in time, the virus came to the human, it became one of the most infectious viruses that we know in humanity for human-to-human transmission... It's not unusual for respiratory pathogens that are being worked on in a laboratory to infect the laboratory worker."

Redfield said normally when a pathogen goes from an animal to human, "it takes awhile for it to figure out how to become more and more efficient in human-to-human transmission."

But in the case of the COVID-19, multiple variants cropped up in just a year, including some that proved to be more transmissible than others.

Redfield said the virus was probably already developing during lab tests.

Since the global outbreak of the COVID-19 in March 2020, the United States has been the country worst hit by the virus. More than 30 million Americans have been infected by it the past year and nearly 550,000 have died from complications caused by it.