Dr. Robert Redfield, the former CDC director, discussed the ongoing debate over the COVID-19 pandemic’s origins during a lengthy interview this past weekend with Dr. Marc Siegel, a professor of medicine at the NYU Langone Medical Center, and a Fox News contributor.
Redfield argued COVID-19’s efficient human-to-human spread contradicted the behavior of other deadly coronaviruses with similar profiles, such as SARS and MERS, which first reached humans through animal contact but spread at a much slower pace.
“When I said before that I didn’t think it was biologically plausible that COVID-19 went from a bat to some unknown animal into man and now had become one of the most infectious viruses,” Redfield said, “That’s not consistent with how other coronaviruses have come into the human species. And, it does suggest that there’s an alternative hypothesis that it went from a bat virus, got into a laboratory, where in the laboratory, it was taught, educated, it evolved, so that it became a virus that could efficiently transmit human to human.”
Redfield, a virologist, expressed disappointment in what he described as a “lack of openness” within the scientific community to “pursue both hypotheses.”
“I’m just giving my best opinion as a virologist, and I don’t think it’s plausible that this virus went from a bat to an animal – we still don’t know that animal – and then went into humans and immediately had learned how to be human-to-human transmissible to the point of now causing one of the greatest pandemics we’ve had in the history of the world,” Redfield added.
Redfield also expressed doubt about the integrity of the World Health Organization.
“Clearly, they were incapable of compelling China to adhere to the treaty agreements that they have on global health because they didn’t do that. Clearly, they allowed China to define the group of scientists that could come and investigate,” Redfield said. “That’s not consistent with their role.”
Has he seen the bats in the Wuhan lab yet? Watch:
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