"No evidence" to support former CDC director's theory that coronavirus escaped from lab, scientists say

Dr. Robert Redfield, the former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told CNN he believes the coronavirus originally escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China. But a team of experts from the World Health Organization, Dr. Anthony Fauci, and a number of virology experts have said the evidence to support such a claim just isn't there.

"I do not believe this somehow came from a bat to a human. And at that moment in time, the virus came to the human, became one of the most infectious viruses that we know in humanity for human to human transmission," Redfield told CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta during an interview taped in January, to be aired in full on Sunday. "Normally, when a pathogen goes from a zoonot to human, it takes a while for it to figure out how to become more and more efficient." Redfield, a virologist who headed the CDC under President Trump, stressed several times that this is just his opinion, not a proven fact. "I'm allowed to have opinions now," he said. According to Redfield, the extremely fast transmission of the then-novel coronavirus, in his view, indicates that it was likely grown in a lab for that exact purpose. "Most of us in a lab, when trying to grow a virus, we try to help make it grow better, and better, and better, and better, and better, and better so we can do experiments and figure out about it. That's the way I put it together," he said of his theory.