Robert Redfield, the ex-director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has said for the first time that he believes the COVID-19 pandemic began in a lab in the Chinese city of Wuhan. Redfield made the extraordinary claim in an interview with CNN’s chief medical correspondent Sanjay Gupta. He provided no evidence for his belief, and stressed that it’s only an opinion—not a fact. Redfield said: “If I was to guess, this virus started transmitting somewhere in September or October in Wuhan... That’s my own view, it’s only an opinion, I’m allowed to have opinions now.” The former Trump official went on: “I still think the most likely etiology of this pathogen in Wuhan was from a laboratory. You know, escaped. Other people don’t believe that, that’s fine, science will eventually figure it out.” A World Health Organization team that went to Wuhan to investigate the virus said the lab-accident theory is “extremely unlikely.”
