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Covid-19 virus may have escaped from Wuhan lab: Ex-CDC chief
A former top public health official who was part of the team that led the Trump administration’s response to Covid-19 has said he believes the deadly pathogen “escaped” from the Chinese virology lab in Wuhan
A former top public health official who was part of the team that led the Trump administration’s response to Covid-19 has said he believes the deadly pathogen “escaped” from the Chinese virology lab in Wuhan.
Robert R Redfield, who headed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the Trump administration, made this explosive claim as a “point of view”, without citing any evidence, and also went on to say that he believes the virus transmitted to humans in September-October 2019, way before the first cases were detected in December that year.
Redfield made these claims in an interview to CNN for a programme that airs later on Friday. “If I was to guess, this virus started transmitting somewhere in September, October in Wuhan,” Redfield said.
“I am of the point of view that I still think the most likely etiology of this pathogen in Wuhan was from a laboratory, you know, (it) escaped,” Redfield went on to say, but acknowledged problems with that claim in the same breath.
“Other people don’t believe that, that’s fine; science will eventually figure it out,” the former CDC chief went on to say, adding, “it’s not unusual for respiratory pathogens that are being worked on in a laboratory to infect a laboratory worker”.
There have been reports that some lab workers at the Wuhan laboratory had fallen sick in the fall of 2019, but not clear from what.
A team of experts appointed by the World Health Organization (WHO) from around the world is in final stages of preparing a report on its investigation into the origin of the pandemic.
A Chinese member on this group, Feng Zijian, was part of a team of Chinese officials who briefed diplomats in Beijing on the WHO investigation in Beijing on Friday, Associated Press (AP) has reported and said the Chinese may have done this to get out their view on the report before it is released.
This expert said that the WHO team looked at four ways the virus could have got out, according to AP: a bat carrying the pathogen infected a human; a bat infected an intermediate mammal that spread it to a human; shipments of cold or frozen food; and finally, a laboratory that researches viruses in Wuhan.
The expert further said at the briefing for diplomats, according to AP, WHO experts favoured “one of the two animal routes or the cold chain was most likely how it was transmitted”.
The lab-leak theory was viewed as extremely unlikely.
The first cases of Covid-19 were reported in late December 2019 in Wuhan, China, which is home to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. WHO had said in a report in March 2020 that a large proportion of the initial cases had a direct link to the Huanan Wholesale Seafood Market in Wuhan City, where seafood, wild, and farmed animal species were sold. WHO had found that many of the initial patients were stall owners, market employees, and/or regular visitors to the market.
But many experts believe the virus came from the Wuhan lab. “I am a virologist; I have spent my life in virology. I do not believe this somehow came from a bat to a human,” Redfield said in the CNN interview.
“And at that moment in time, the virus that came to the human became one of the most infectious viruses that we know and humanity, for human-to-human transmission.”
Normally when a pathogen goes from animals to humans, he said, “It 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.”
