WHO advisory committee member on COVID coming from Wuhan lab: 'Coincidences are just too great'

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WHO advisory committee member on COVID escaping from Wuhan lab: 'Coincidences are just too great'

WHO advisory committee member Jamie Metzl calls for a full investigation into the origins of COVID-19 with unrestricted access to all records in China.

A WHO advisory board member argued Tuesday that the COVID-19 outbreak "most likely" escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, telling "America's Newsroom" that the "coincidences are just too great" for the virus to not have originated in the Chinese lab.

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JAMIE METZL: I think we need a full investigation into the origins of this terrible pandemic, we've needed it since day one. China has been blocking that. It's been very difficult for people like me and others to raise this critical issue. But now the conversation is opening up and there's a very real possibility this pandemic escaped from -- the virus escaped from the lab, starting the pandemic. It's still possible there could have been some kind of zoonotic jump in the wild. That's why we need a full investigation with unrestricted access to all the relevant records, samples and personnel. And it's just unbelievable that a year and a half after the initial outbreak, we still don't have that.  

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I think it's most likely a lab incident origin. For me, the coincidences are just too great that this pandemic doesn't start in southern China where they have horseshoe bats, but it starts in Wuhan where they don't have any horseshoe bats in the wild. They have China's only level four virology institute with the world's largest collection of bat coronaviruses. 

As Redfield correctly states, this virus, it just shows up on day one, ready to infect humans. And that's very dissimilar from most of the other pathogenic outbreaks in the wild that we've seen in the past. There are some really big questions in my mind. They point toward but don't yet conclusively prove the lab incident origin, which again is why we need a full investigation.

WATCH THE FULL INTERVIEW BELOW:

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