Former U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Robert Redfield believes that the SARS-Cov-2 virus, which causes COVID-19, originated in a laboratory in the city of Wuhan, China.
Redfield’s comments, which support a controversial theory about the origin of the unproven coronavirus, appear in a documentary to be released Sunday by CNN.
According to Redfield, who is a virologist, the virus “escaped” from the lab, something that happened not necessarily intentionally. “I am of the opinion that the most likely etiology of this pathogen in Wuhan was that of a laboratory,” he says in a fragment of the documentary made public this Friday, where he considers that, “if I had to guess,” SARS-CoV-2 began to be transmitted “in September or October (of 2019) in Wuhan.”
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“The other people don’t believe it. That’s fine. Science will find out,” he added, before qualifying that “it’s not unusual for respiratory pathogens that you work with in a laboratory to infect the worker.”
There is no clear evidence to support the theory that the virus was created in a laboratory, although it has been frequently mentioned in conspiracy theories. Former U.S. President Donald Trump has also expressed himself along these lines on several occasions. For its part, the World Health Organization (WHO) considers this explanation of the origin of SARS-CoV-2 “extremely unlikely”.
