On April 8, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN’s chief medial correspondent, made news when, during an interview with Mediaite, said that he has reason to believe the COVID-19 originated at a lab in Wuhan China and not from a bat in a wet market.
Gupta’s comments come as a growing number of medical and scientific professionals are putting pressure on China to release the origin of the virus and give the world the genetic data they need to prevent another pandemic.
During the interview, Dr. Gupta commented on former CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield—who on a CNN special about COVID said, ‘I’m of the point of view that I still think the most likely etiology of this pathogen in Wuhan was from a laboratory… escaped. Other people don’t believe that, that’s fine. Science will eventually figure it out.’
Gupta, who hosted the interview with Dr. Redfield, Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx, said, “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,”
“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,” said Gupta, adding “ 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.”
‘I was not as shocked by what he said as the fact that he said it. There’s reason to suspect that this is the origin of the virus,” said Gupta, one of the most trusted medical professionals on TV in the United States during COVID.
The other reason why Gupta and others are starting to come to the conclusion that COVID-19 originated in the Wuhan Lab is that there has been no evidence presented to prove a wet market, or a bat, was the origin of the coronavirus.
China continues to deny that the Wuhan lab is the source of COVID-19, but has not given scientists and biologists from the US and Europe access to “full access” to the lab, now 16 months after the outbreak began.
A report by the WHO, released in March 2021 , was immediately rejected by the scientific community because they were allowed access to the Wuhan lab. WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus even admitted that China withheld data from investigators.
During Gupta’s interview with Redfield, he gave the former CDC director a chance to walk back his comments but he refused. “Hereally was quite adamant that this was the origin of the virus.”
In March of 2021, , a letter signed by 26 Doctors and Virologists across the world, called for a full investigation into the origins of COVID-19. “ Based on our analysis, and as confirmed by the global study convened by the World Health Organization (WHO) and Chinese authorities, there is as yet no evidence demonstrating a fully natural origin of this virus.–… With more than two million deaths, more than a hundred million infected by COVID-19 worldwide, and a massive global disruption impacting some of the world’s most vulnerable populations, we cannot afford an investigation into the origins of the pandemic that is anything less than absolutely thorough and credible. If we fail to fully and courageously examine the origins of this pandemic, we risk being unprepared for a potentially worse pandemic in the future. Because we believe the joint team process and efforts to date do not constitute a thorough, credible, and transparent investigation, we call on the international community to put in place a structure and process that does,” states the letter.
Jamie Metzl, Senior Fellow, Atlantic Council signed the letter and added, “It’s crazy that a year into this, there is no full investigation into the origins of the pandemic.”
Anthony Regalado, in the MIT Technology Review, writes, “More than a year after covid-19 began, no food animal has been identified as a reservoir for the pandemic virus. That’s despite efforts by China to test tens of thousands of animals, including pigs, goats, and geese, according to Liang Wannian, who leads the Chinese side of the research team. No one has found a “direct progenitor” of the virus, he says, and therefore the pandemic “remains an unsolved mystery.”
the video link to Gupta’s interview on Mediaite is https://www.mediaite.com/podcasts/the-interview-dr-sanjay-gupta-talks-vaccines-and-why-he-gives-weight-to-informed-theory-that-covid-leaked-from-wuhan-lab/
