Dr. Robert Redfield, the former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told CNN he believes it coronavirus originally escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan, China. But a team of experts from the World Health Organisation, Dr. Anthony Fauci, and a number of virology experts have said that the evidence to support such a claim is simply not there.
“I don’t believe this came about in any way of a bat for a human. And that’s when the virus got into humans, became one of the most contagious viruses known in humanity for human-to-human transmission, “Redfield told CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta in an interview taped in January. , to be broadcast, all on Sunday. “Normally it takes a while for a pathogen to go from a zoonot to a human to figure out how to become more and more efficient.”
Redfield, a virologist who led the CDC under President Trump, stressed several times that this is just his opinion, not a proven fact. “I can have an opinion now,” he said. According to Redfield, the extremely rapid transmission of the then coronavirus, he says, indicates that it was probably grown in a laboratory for that exact purpose. “Most of us in a lab, when we’re trying to grow a virus, we’re trying to help it grow better, and better, and better, and better, and better, and better, so we can do experiments and find out. the way I put it together, ”he said of his theory.
However, Redfield also said he believes the virus started spreading months earlier than ever thought – perhaps since September or October 2019, a time frame roughly supported by recent research. That extra time the virus may have spent circulating unnoticed could help explain how it became “efficient” at transmission – without having been “leaked” from a lab.
Dr. Anthony Fauci addressed Redfield’s comments during Friday’s COVID-19 briefing and suggested that most public health officials disagree. He noted that if the virus had escaped from a laboratory, it would mean that “it was essentially entering the external human population that was already well adapted to humans.”
“However, the alternative explanation most people in the public health field follow is that this virus actually circulated in China for a month or more, probably in Wuhan, before being clinically recognized in late December 2019,” Fauci said.
“If it were, the virus could clearly have adapted to greater transmittance efficiency during that period, right up to the moment it was recognized. So Dr. Redfield said he expressed an opinion as a possibility, but again, there are other alternatives – others that most people stick to. “
Understanding when the coronavirus first emerged is an important piece of the epidemiological puzzle, one that scientists around the world, including one team of the WHO, have worked to nail down. A study recently published in the journal Science found that “the period between mid-October and mid-November 2019” was “the plausible interval in which the first case of SARS-CoV-2 emerged in Hubei province.”
“It is very likely that SARS-CoV-2 was circulating at a low level in Hubei province in early November 2019 and possibly as early as October 2019, but not earlier,” the study said. But for weeks or months, the prevalence was low enough to escape attention. “By the time COVID-19 was first identified, the virus had become firmly established in Wuhan.”
Kristian G. Andersen, director of the Genomics Institute for Infectious Diseases, translational research institute at Scripps Research, told CBS News that “none of (Redfield’s) comments” about the laboratory theory is “supported by available evidence.”
“It is clear that not only was he the most disastrous CDC director in US history, where he utterly failed in his sworn mission to keep the country safe, but through his comments he also shows a complete lack of fundamental evolutionary virology, ”said Andersen. .
Andersen was the lead author of a study published last year in Nature Medicine that found the virus to be a product of natural evolution. In addition, through analysis of publicly available genome sequence data, the scientists found “no evidence that the virus was made in a lab or otherwise developed,” according to a Scripps press release.
“By comparing the available genome sequence data from known strains of coronavirus, we can determine with certainty that SARS-CoV-2 was created by natural processes,” Andersen said at the time.
W. Ian Lipkin, a study co-author with Andersen and the director of the Center for Infection and Immunity at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health, said that while much remains, we don’t know about the virus, including exactly how long it is circulating, there is “no evidence” to suggest it was made in a laboratory.
“Just because we haven’t seen it before doesn’t mean it was made in a lab,” he said. Lipkin pointed out the coronavirus’s ability to multiply in other animals, such as outbreaks under mink, and the emergence of highly transferable variants around the world – “without any change to a laboratory” – as proof to the contrary.
“The changes exploited by the virus are not the changes we predicted,” he said, adding, “even if we had wanted to design such a virus, we wouldn’t have known how to do it.”
Lipkin called Redfield’s comments “ counterproductive, ” especially given the rise of discrimination and violence against Asian Americans during the pandemic. “We would no longer point the finger,” he said.
Andersen and his colleagues concluded that the virus most likely came from one of two scenarios. The first is that “the virus evolved to its current pathogenic state by natural selection in a non-human host and then jumped to humans,” the press release said. The second is that “a non-pathogenic version of the virus from an animal host sprang into humans and then evolved to its current pathogenic state within the human population.”
“We know that bats carry viruses very similar to SARS-CoV-2, so it is likely that it came directly from bats. Like SARS, it may be from an intermediate host – which we have not identified,” Andersen explained. “There’s absolutely nothing out of the ordinary about the fact that we haven’t found such an intermediate host (if one exists at all) and someone who says otherwise just hasn’t read the literature.”
The current CDC director, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, said at Friday’s briefing that the White House team is “looking forward” to a report from the WHO that “examines the origins of this pandemic and of SARS-CoV-2 in humans.” But China is not on the way with information that can be the key to a complete understanding.
Andersen noted that “we don’t know the origin (reservoirs) of this most viruses that infect humans, “including other recent viruses like Ebola,” and for those of which we have an idea, it could take decades. “
“We know that the first epidemiologically linked cluster of cases came from the Huanan market, and we know that the virus was found in environmental samples – including animal cages – in the market,” he said. “Any ‘lab leak’ theory should account for that scenario – which it simply cannot do without invoking and covering up a major conspiracy by Chinese scientists and authorities.”
His scathing conclusion: “Redfield has no idea what he’s talking about – plain and simple. It’s no surprise given his disastrous tenure as CDC director.”