The former head of the Food and Drug Administration said on Sunday that the likelihood COVID-19 originated in a lab is growing while the odds that the coronavirus was transmitted from animals to humans grow longer.
‘The challenge is that the side of the ledger that suggests that this could have come out of a lab has continued to expand,’ Dr. Scott Gottlieb, who served as then-President Trump’s FDA commission from 2017 until 2019, told CBS News.
‘And a side of the ledger that suggests that this could have come from a zoonotic source, come out of nature, really hasn't budged.’
Gottlieb said that there is enough evidence to rule out the earlier theory that coronavirus originated from a ‘wet market’ in Wuhan.
Gottlieb added: ‘And if anything, you can argue that that side of the ledger has contracted because we've done an exhaustive search for the so-called intermediate host, the animal that could have been exposed to this virus before it spread to humans.
Dr. Scott Gottlieb, who served as then-President Trump’s FDA commission from 2017 until 2019, said on Sunday that the likelihood COVID-19 originated in a lab is growing while the odds that the coronavirus was transmitted from animals to humans grow longer
Gottlieb says China has key data that could shed more light on whether the coronavirus accidentally leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (pictured in April 2020)
‘We have not found such an animal.’
Once dismissed as a fringe conspiracy theory promoted by the Trump administration, mainstream media has reversed itself in recent weeks as circumstantial evidence has surfaced indicating that it is possible coronavirus accidentally leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Last week, The Wall Street Journal reported that lab technicians at the facility mysteriously fell ill with symptoms consistent with COVID-19 as far back as November 2019 - just weeks before the virus began to spread in earnest in China.
The Chinese government did not officially report its first case of coronavirus until December 2019.
In the initial stages of the pandemic, it was speculated that the virus may have been spread from animals sold at a local ‘wet market’ in Wuhan.
But Gottlieb told CBS News on SUnday that this theory has now been ‘fully disproven.’
He said that China holds the key to understanding the origins of the virus. The government could provide evidence like blood samples of the lab technicians who fell ill as well as original source strains and early samples of the virus.
'If we assess that there is a probability or a possibility that this came out of a lab, it's going to affect how we respond to this,' he said.
'We're going to need to focus on trying to get better controls in this sort of high-risk research going forward and get better controls over these BSL-4, these high security labs that conduct this research.'
'BSL-4' is the highest biosafety level of containment for a laboratory.
Gottlieb said that lab leaks aren’t rare and that ‘mishaps’ have occurred - even in the United States.
Last week, The Wall Street Journal reported that lab technicians at the facility mysteriously fell ill with symptoms consistent with COVID-19 as far back as November 2019 - just weeks before the virus began to spread in earnest in China. The Chinese government did not officially report its first case of coronavirus until December 2019. The image above from the lab in Wuhan was taken in February 2017
He said getting to the bottom of what caused the pandemic is important since ‘we need to also look at public health through the lens of national security.’
‘This was an asymmetric harm to the United States,’ Gottlieb said.
‘COVID hurt the U.S. a lot more than it hurt many other countries.’
The former FDA commissioner warns the public may not ever know how the virus spread.
'We may never really determine with precision whether or not this came out of a lab,' he said.
'I think what we're likely to end up with is an assessment, a probability, unless we get very lucky and we either find the intermediate host, we find a colony of civet cats or pangolins where this is epidemic and it could have first spilled over into humans, or we have a whistleblower in China or regime change, which we're not going to have.
'I don't know that we're going to find out with certainty that this came out of a lab.'
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