CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta offered support for former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Chief Robert Redfield’s theory that COVID-19 “escaped” from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
“Now, I am of the point of view that I still think the most likely aetiology of this pathogen in Wuhan was from a laboratory, escaped,” Redfield asserted in a recent interview with Gupta for CNN.
Gupta appeared to back Redfield’s claims while speaking on Mediate’s The Interview podcast, noting “He’s an experienced virologist. He was also head of the CDC at the time this was happening, which means that in addition to everything that we know, he had access to raw data and raw intelligence that was coming out of China.”
“There’s reason to suspect that this is the origin of the virus,” he added.
Gupta also described Redfield’s theory as “much more informed”:
“My point is that it’s a much more informed sort of thing for him to be saying than for anybody who may have expertise in virology because he has a lot more knowledge and information that he has that maybe he can’t share, but is informing his opinion.”
“I was not as shocked by what he said as the fact that he said it,” Gupta continued before calling the lab leak theory the “simplest explanation” that would “make sense”:
“It’s a big virology lab right in Wuhan that happened to be studying bat coronaviruses. Just from an Occam’s razor standpoint, finding the simplest explanation, it would make sense,’ he said, adding, ‘We still don’t know for certain what the origin is.”
