Robert Redfield, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told CNN Friday he believes the virus that causes COVID-19 was accidentally released from a lab in Wuhan, China. The former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention slammed China’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic — admitting that he could use the word “cover-up” to describe the country’s response to the virus, which has now killed more than 2.7 million people globally. Redfield stressed he was not implying “intentionality,” and no credible scientist, including Redfield, believes the virus was man-made. Still, Redfield’s comments sparked debate. “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, escaped,” Redfield told CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta during an interview taped in January. “Now, other people don’t believe that, that’s fine. Science will eventually figure it out. It’s not unusual for respiratory pathogens that are being worked on in the laboratory to infect the laboratory worker.”
The Wuhan Institute of Virology is in the city where the coronavirus was first reported in an animal market in late December 2019. But the virus likely has been around since September or October 2019, Redfield said. Infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci, who is chief medical advisor to President Joe Biden, also agrees the virus was likely below the radar in China and spreading before it was reported. That extra time the virus may have spent circulating undetected could help explain how it became “efficient” at transmission — without having been “leaked” from a lab.
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