Many experts in the field of virology and national security believe that COVID-19 may have originated in a Chinese laboratory. On Tuesday, the World Health Organization released a report stating the hypotheses of a lab leak of the virus was ''extremely unlikely.'' This has critics up in arms.
According to NPR, the city of Wuhan, China, where the virus is said to have originated, is home to some of the country's most-advanced biological research laboratories, including the state-run Wuhan Institute of Virology. The institute is known for conducting experiments on viruses like the one that causes COVID-19 and has claimed the lives of nearly 3 million people worldwide.
''I think there were a lot of people who did put together the fact that you had an outbreak in Wuhan and you have these laboratories in Wuhan fairly immediately,'' said David Feith, who served as the U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs for the Trump administration when the pandemic broke loose.
Feith says that the evidence about the virus' origins were sketchy at the beginning of the outbreak, but that many people, including former President Donald Trump, believed that the culprit came from a Wuhan lab, according to NPR.
But even though WHO published its conclusions after a four-week investigation with Beijing to gather critical information on the origins of COVID-19, its own Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus criticized the report.
''Although the team has concluded that a laboratory leak is the least likely hypothesis, this requires further investigation, potentially with additional missions involving specialist experts, which I am willing to deploy,'' he said in a statement, adding that the WHO report was just the beginning and not the end of uncovering the source of the virus. ''We must follow the science and leave no stone unturned.''
Dr. Robert Redfield, the former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, publicly slammed China's handling of the coronavirus pandemic, saying that he would use the word ''cover-up'' to label their lack of transparency in the issue.
''A year after this pathogen started, we're now having a critical analysis of where it came from by scientists,'' he said, according to the New York Post. ''It seems to me that some of the information is people not being transparent about it. I could use the word 'cover-up,' but don't know that so I'm not going to speculate that.''
He said he offered CDC assistance to help the Chinese investigate how and where the virus originated and even then-President Trump called President Xi Jinping, but their offers were not accepted, according to the Post.
Redfield, a noted virologist, reiterated his belief that the pandemic leaked from a Wuhan lab but said he did not think it was an intentional move.
''Science will eventually figure it out,'' said Redfield. ''It's not unusual for respiratory pathogens that are being worked on in a laboratory to infect a laboratory worker,'' he added.
According to Fox News, Jamie Metzl, an American author and member of the WHO international panel on Human Genome editing, slammed the organization for what he called their ''outrageous conclusion'' that it was ''highly unlikely'' that COVID-19 was the result of an accidental Wuhan laboratory leak.
"They did a great job of considering the possibility of a zoonotic jump between intermediate animal hosts and frozen food transmission," Metzl said. "But they did absolutely nothing to even consider the possibility of an accidental leak. And it's outrageous that they would assert that it's highly unlikely when they didn't even bother to look into it."
According to NPR, a U.S. State Department fact sheet revealed that there were several sick lab workers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in the fall of 2019 and note that there was secret military activity at the facility because it was working on a dangerous type of coronavirus research. While China has refuted this claim, Metzl says that the WHO researchers should have pressed the point and gone further with their investigation.
But other experts say that digging deeper into the origins of the virus may prove politically damaging to the relationship between the two countries.
''And no matter how good the rational explanations of another WHO committee, there's a subset of people in both countries that that will not believe the most likely answers,'' said Harvard immunologist Dr. Barry Bloom, who is an expert in global health, per NPR.