NIH Director on Covid Lab Leak Theory: ‘The Most Likely Explanation Is Still a Natural Transmission’

EXCERPT:

COLLINS: "Again, I think the most likely explanation is still a natural transmission."

MacCALLUM: "Why do you think that?"

COLLINS: "Let’s be fair here. Because that’s always been the case with other coronaviruses. With SARS it turned out to be a civet cat, with MERS it was a camel, Ebola we still don't know what the intermediate host was. It’s not easy to figure this out. So just on a historical basis, that is the most likely path that was traveled. And again, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. To claim that the lab was responsible, we need to know that, but I don’t think anybody, you or any of the others who are commenting, should jump to the conclusion that that's the most likely explanation right now. We do not know that. It might be, but we don’t know."