[PJ] Robert Redfield, the former director of the CDC, told CNN that he believes COVID-19 "escaped" from the Wuhan Institute of Virology and that it was spreading as early as September or October of 2020, roughly two to three months before China alerted the World Health Organization about it. He stressed that it was his opinion."I’m of the point of view that I still think the most likely etiology of this pathology in Wuhan was from a laboratory," Redfield told CNN’s Sanjay Gupta. "Escaped. 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 a laboratory to infect the laboratory worker," he continued, before clarifying that he was not "implying any intentionality."
"It’s my opinion, right? But I am a virologist. I have spent my life in virology," he added. "I do not believe this somehow came from a bat to a human and at that moment in time that the virus came to the human, became one of the most infectious viruses that we know in humanity for human-to-human transmission."
Redfield was the director of the CDC from 2018 through the end of the Trump administration.
The World Health Organization allegedly investigated the origins of the virus and said it was "extremely unlikely," though the organization’s relationship with China has raised some questions in the past.
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