"We need to get to the bottom of this," says White House adviser Slavitt.
By Ryan Basen, business writer and researcher, MedPage Today
Leaders of the White House COVID-19 task force refused to completely rule out a popular theory that the coronavirus originated in a laboratory in Wuhan, China.
During a press conference on Tuesday, NIAID Director Anthony Fauci, MD, said that "we don't know 100%" where the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19 came from.
"We all feel strongly that we should continue the investigation and move to the next phase of the investigation that [the World Health Organization] has conducted," said Fauci, President Biden's top medical adviser.
White House senior advisor for the COVID-19 response, Andy Slavitt, added, "We need a completely transparent process from China."
"We need the WHO to help us with that. We don't feel like we have it now. We need to get to the bottom of this, whatever the answer is, and that's a critical priority for us," he said.
Theories that SARS-CoV-2 may have escaped from a laboratory have gained more credibility recently. A Wall Street Journal report citing US intelligence found that three researchers at the Wuhan lab were ill enough to seek hospital care in November 2019 for symptoms consistent with either COVID-19 or seasonal illness.
But Tuesday's comments were among the first and strongest remarks from members of the White House task force on the virus's origin. During the briefing, members were asked about the possibility that the virus "escaped from a lab."
“Many of us feel that this is more likely to be a natural occurrence,” Fauci said, citing the theory that the virus jumped from an animal reservoir to a human. He referred to the SARS epidemic earlier this century as a precedent.
Chinese authorities and many public health experts have long claimed that the virus likely originated in a wet market in Wuhan or a similar setting, possibly spreading from bats to other species before jumping to humans.
Other public health officials, experts, and politicians have cited the possibility of a laboratory leak, given that the Chinese government was studying coronaviruses. Several researchers recently wrote a letter to Science, calling for “greater clarity” on the origin of the pandemic.
China has prevented the WHO from conducting thorough and independent investigations into the origin of the virus, which date back at least to the fall. WHO researchers were allowed to work within the country with scientists and other individuals approved by China.
Robert Redfield, MD, former director of the CDC during the Trump presidency, told CNN in late March that he believed the virus was spreading in Wuhan as early as September or October 2019. Redfield said the "most likely etiology" of the pathogen was that it "escaped" from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, because they were conducting experiments with bat coronaviruses.
During that same CNN program, Fauci said about China, "they have not been transparent in the past."