On Monday’s broadcast of NewsNation’s “The Hill,” Dr. Tom Frieden, who served as CDC Director under President Barack Obama, argued that while no one can say for sure how COVID-19 originated, we do know for sure that lab leaks are a “major” risk and we “need to be regulating gain-of-function research more and reducing the number of laboratories that could — on purpose or by mistake — create a deadly organism that causes a lot of death and destruction.”
Frieden said that both the lab leak and natural origin theories for the origins of COVID-19 are “plausible, and we don’t have enough evidence to definitively say it’s one or the other. But both of them are risks. And so, whatever happened, we know we need to do a much better job protecting ourselves and the world from both lab leaks and natural spillover. Because even before COVID, we had had lab leaks with smallpox…with SARS, with anthrax in the U.S., probably with flu. So, lab leaks we know are a risk. And spillover is really where probably three-quarters of all of the big outbreaks come from, including SARS and some very risky flu pandemic-potential viruses.”
He concluded, “We can say with certainty that both lab leak and spillover are major risks for us and we need to get better globally at finding outbreaks quickly, getting them reported the same day they’re found, and [putting] all essential control measures in place. We should be able to do each of those things regularly for every outbreak, everywhere in the world. That’s what we need to be focusing on. We also need to be regulating gain-of-function research more and reducing the number of laboratories that could — on purpose or by mistake — create a deadly organism that causes a lot of death and destruction.”
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