The director of the National Institutes of Health said Monday that the Covid-19 appears to have come from an animal, but did not rule out the possibility that scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology were studying it in secret and that from there could have been filtered. .
It is still unknown whether the virus came out of a laboratory in Wuhan, NIH director Dr. Francis Collins said Monday in an interview with CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” which added that the organization’s research World Health Organization on the origin of coronavirus has gone “backwards”.
“The great evidence from other perspectives says no, it was a natural virus,” Collins said. “It does not mean that it could not have been secretly studied at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and left there, we do not know. But the virus itself does not have the marks of having been intentionally created by the human labor. “
The WHO investigation has been made more difficult by China’s refusal to participate, Collins says.
“I think China basically refused to consider another WHO investigation and said it‘ doesn’t interest me, ’” Collins told CNBC’s Squawk Box.
“Wouldn’t it be nice if they really opened their lab books and let us know what they were really doing there and find out more about those cases of people who got sick in November 2019 and we really don’t? You know enough,” Collins said. .
U.S. intelligence reports first published 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, a report that China said was “completely false.”
About three months ago, President Joe Biden began an investigation of his own and gave his intelligence community 90 days to continue investigating the origins of the virus and report the findings. The deadline is Tuesday.
“It will be an interesting week because tomorrow is the 90-day deadline that President Biden set for the intelligence community to do everything they could to see if they could get to know better how this virus started in China. “Collins said.
Most of the information collected will likely remain classified, but some information from the report will be published, according to Collins.
“We don’t know what they’re going to come up with either, but we’re very interested,” Collins said.
Collins also reflected on the debate over whether or not the United States funded the so-called investigation into the gain of office function in Wuhan, a debate that Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky and the president’s medical adviser, the Dr. Anthony Fauci, I have dedicated myself time and time again. Function gain research is when scientists take a pathogen and make it more contagious, deadly, or both study how to fight it.
“The kind of function gain research that is under very careful examination is when a human pathogen is taken and something is done that improves its virulence or transmissibility,” Collins said. “They weren’t studying a pathogen that was a pathogen for humans. It’s a bat virus.”
Some of the research from the Wuhan Institute of Virology that funded, in part, the NIH through a grant to the nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance studied how bat viruses could infect humans.
“Thus, according to the strict definition, all reviewers of the research examined it very carefully with the anticipation that this might lead to the conclusion that it did not meet the official description of what is called function gain research that requires supervision “. “I know this has attracted a lot of attention, but I think it’s out of place.”