What are the origins of the pandemic?

What are the origins of the pandemic?

 

Over the past few months, I’ve had the extraordinary chance to sit down with the doctors who worked on former President Donald Trump’s coronavirus task force to examine what happened over the past year. One of the questions I asked was: How did this all begin? One of the most striking things I heard was from former CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield, who was very vocal about his suspicions around the information that came out of China.    He believes the current pandemic began in Wuhan as a localized outbreak in September or October of 2019 -- much earlier than the official timeline -- and then spread to every province in China over the next couple of months. The United States wasn't formally notified of the "mysterious cluster of pneumonia patients" until December 31, 2019. Those were critical weeks and months that countries around the world could've been preparing.   Redfield told me, "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 ... Normally, when a pathogen goes from a zoonot to human, it takes a while for it to figure out how to become more and more efficient."   Without assigning intentionality, Redfield told me he believes the origin of the pandemic was a lab in China that was already studying the virus, exposing it to human cell cultures. "Most of us in a lab, when 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," he said.   It is a controversial, politically charged theory -- one the World Health Organization calls "extremely unlikely." There has been no clear evidence to support this "lab leak" theory. The WHO released its report on the origins of the coronavirus on Tuesday. "At this stage, it is not possible to determine precisely how humans in China were initially infected with SARS-CoV-2," it said. "However, all available evidence suggests that SARS-CoV-2 has a natural animal origin and is not a manipulated or constructed virus."       Dr. Anthony Fauci, who was also on Trump's coronavirus task force, has said he wanted to look closely at the WHO report before he commented on it. But when asked about Redfield's remarks, he noted there have been several theories about where the virus originated. “One of them is in the lab, and one of them, which is more likely, which most public health officials agree with, is that it was likely below the radar screen spreading in the community in China for several weeks, if not a month or more, which allowed it, when it first got recognized clinically, to be pretty well adapted, “ said Fauci.