Fauci: Virus Jumping from Animal to Human Is Not Unusual — We See That in HIV/AIDS

EXCERPT:

FAUCI: “In my opinion, and in the opinion of most virologists who understand the process, it is much more likely, though not definitive, that it was a natural occurrence from jumping from an animal into a human at the Wuhan market. But since it’s not definitive, there’s still a possibility that somewhere in China something was going on where people brought in a virus from the environment and it escaped from the lab. So, given that there are two possibilities, the way to do it is try to prevent both of those possibilities from happening again. Put better constraints on the kinds of experiments, make sure that there’s good facilities to do it, people are well-trained. And do something about the animal-human interface, because it is 75 to 80 percent of the new viruses and infections that come out are what we call zoonotic. They jump from an animal model, an animal reservoir, to a human. We saw that with HIV/AIDS, we’ve seen that with influenza, w see that with Ebola. So that’s not something that is unusual. That happens a fair amount."