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The director of the National Institutes of Health said on Monday that it appears Covid-19 originated from an animal, but he did not rule out the possibility that scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology are secretly studying it and that ‘he was able to escape. .
It is still not known whether the virus escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan, NIH director Dr Francis Collins said in an interview with CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Monday, adding that the investigation of the World Health Organization on the origin of the coronavirus had “receded”.
“A lot of evidence from other points of view says no, it was a natural virus,” Collins said. “Not to say that it could not have been studied in secret at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and come out of it, we don’t know. But the virus itself does not have the mark of having was created intentionally by human labor. “
The WHO investigation was made more difficult by China’s refusal to participate, Collins said.
“I think China basically refused to consider another WHO investigation and just said ‘no, not interested’,” Collins told CNBC’s Squawk Box.
“Wouldn’t it be nice if they actually opened their lab books and let us know what they were actually doing there and find out more about the cases of people who fell ill in November 2019 that we didn’t really not know enough, ”Collins said.
U.S. intelligence reports first reported by the Wall Street Journal indicated that in November 2019, three workers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology fell ill with symptoms similar to those seen in Covid-19 infections. , a report that China called “completely bogus”.
About three months ago, President Joe Biden launched his own investigation and gave his intelligence community 90 days to further investigate the origins of the virus and report the results. The deadline is Tuesday.
“It will be an interesting week because tomorrow is the day of the 90-day deadline President Biden has set for the intelligence community to do everything possible to see if they can find more information on how this virus came to be. started in China, ”Collins said.
Most of the information gathered will likely remain classified, but some information in the report will be released, Collins said.
“We also don’t know what they’re going to come up with, but we’re extremely interested,” Collins said.
Collins also weighed in on the debate over whether or not the United States funded the so-called search for office work at the Wuhan lab, a debate that Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky and medical adviser to the president , Dr.Anthony Fauci, have committed themselves time and time again. Gain-of-function research is when scientists take a pathogen and make it more contagious, deadly, or both to study how to fight it.
“The type of gain-of-function research that is under very close scrutiny is to take a human pathogen and do something with it that would increase its virulence or transmissibility,” Collins said. “They weren’t studying a pathogen that was a human pathogen, they’re bat viruses.”
Some of the research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, funded in part by the NIH through a grant to the nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance, investigated how bat viruses could infect humans.
“So by the strict definition, and this has been carefully considered by all reviewers of this research in anticipation that it might happen, is that it did not fit the official description of what is called gain research. function that requires monitoring, ”Collins said. “I know it got a lot of attention, but I think it’s irrelevant.”
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