One more prominent voice is now suggesting that the coronavirus may have started as a Chinese biological experiment gone wrong.
Dr. Robert Redfield, the head of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention under President Donald Trump, told CNN that he is not among the lab-escape deniers.
“I am of the point of view that I still think the most likely etiology of this pathogen in Wuhan was from a laboratory,” he said during an interview with Sanjay Gupta.
Redfield admitted others would not buy that. But, he said, “science would eventually figure it out.”
Redfield also said he was not accusing Chinese scientists or officials of “intentionality,” and that he was expressing a personal opinion.
Yet, he added, “It’s not unusual for respiratory pathogens that are being worked on in a laboratory to infect a laboratory worker.”
“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, became one of the most infectious viruses that we know in humanity for human-to-human transmission.”
As Redfield, a virologist, explained, “Normally when a pathogen goes from a zoonose to human, 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.”
“Most of us in a lab who are trying to grow a virus we try to help make it grow better and better and better and better and better and better so we can do experiments and figure out about it. That’s the way I put it together.”
Earlier this week The Free Press reported that Alison Young, a longtime investigative journalist who had reported extensively on lab accidents, had expressed dismay in a USA Today op-ed that the Wuhan lab idea was continuing to be dismissed as “a crackpot conspiracy theory fueled by former President Donald Trump’s China-bashing rhetoric.”
“No evidence has been found that directly ties the pandemic virus to an animal source,” Young noted, adding that “lab accidents aren’t rare.”
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Fox News host Steve Hilton has also made this argument in recent weeks.
Even The Washington Post editorial board suggested in February it was time to take a look at the labs in Wuhan.
“There is another pathway, also plausible, that must be investigated. That is the possibility of a laboratory accident or leak. It could have involved a virus that was improperly disposed of or perhaps infected a laboratory worker who then passed it to others,” the Post noted in an editorial.
Republican Sen. Tom Cotton, of Arkansas, claimed vindication with that piece.
A year ago, Cotton was among the first American politicians to call for an investigation into the lab-origination notion – and the liberal media hammered him, accusing Cotton of spreading a “debunked conspiracy theory,” as The Washington Post itself said in a February 2020 article.
Last month, Cotton told Fox News, “It was a year ago this week that I started demanding an investigation into the labs in Wuhan and whether they could have been the source for the plague that China unleashed on the world. You know the media at the time hyperventilated that I was spouting conspiracy theories; now they’re admitting it’s plausible and needs to be investigated. … Even (President Joe Biden’s) friends in liberal media are demanding that we get access to those labs in Wuhan, that China began to come clean about what happened there a year ago.”
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