The former head of the Chinese Center for Disease Control (CDC) admitted Friday there is no evidence linking the origin of COVID-19 to a particular wild animal.
George Gao was the director of the Chinese CDC from 2011 until 2022 and presided over the response to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in Wuhan, China. During his tenure, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) suppressed efforts to investigate the origins of COVID-19, including evidence that could possibly link it to a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).
There is no evidence as yet that proves the COVID-causing virus came from animals, George Gao, former head of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said on Friday. https://t.co/0YnyBwoeJE
— Reuters Health (@Reuters_Health) April 14, 2023
“Even now, people think some animals are the host or reservoir,” Gao said at a summit in London on pandemic preparedness. “Cut a long story short, there is no evidence which animals [were] where the virus comes [from].”
Gao also said that the world would need to come together to tamp down “misinformation” to combat future pandemics. (RELATED: ‘The State Department Has Done Almost Nothing’: Democratic Rep. Brad Sherman Rips Biden Admin On COVID Origins)
There is no definitive proof for where COVID-19 originated. Lab leak proponents argue the virus escaped after research at the WIV. They allege that the CCP authorities and scientists who didn’t want to see a crackdown on dangerous “gain-of-function” research covered up evidence of a leak.
Natural origin proponents say the virus existed naturally in the wild and jumped to humans via some intermediary species. However no animal to date has been identified that the virus jumped to, although scientists have speculated about bats and pangolins as possible hosts.