The director of the National Institute of Health said Monday it appears Covid-19 originated from an animal, as initially claimed, but he would not rule out the possibility that scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology were secretly studying the virus and that it could have leaked out.
It’s still unproven if the virus leaked out of a Wuhan lab, NIH director Dr. Francis Collins said Monday in an interview on CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” adding that the World Health Organization’s investigation into the origin of the coronavirus has gone “backwards.”
“The vast evidence from other perspectives says no, this was a naturally occurring virus,” Collins said. “Not to say that it could not have been under study secretly at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and got out of there, we don’t know about that. But the virus itself does not have the earmarks of having been created intentionally by human work.”
The WHO investigation has been made harder by China’s refusal to participate, says Collins.
“I think China basically refused to consider another WHO investigation and just said ‘nope not interested’,” Collins told CNBC’s Squawk Box.
