Former top White House COVID-19 adviser Dr. Deborah Birx says the coronavirus “came out of the box ready to infect.”
There has been much speculation about the origin of the virus that has killed more than 6.3 million people worldwide, according to the Johns Hopkins Center for Systems Science and Engineering. The virus emerged in Wuhan, China, with speculation that the virus could have emerged from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where scientists were researching vaccines for other coronaviruses.
Birx, an infectious diseases expert who served under former President Donald Trump, told the Daily Mail on Sunday that COVID-19 “came out of the box ready to infect” when it first emerged in December 2019.
COVID “was already more infectious than flu when it first arrived,” she said, noting that most viruses take months or even years to become highly infectious to humans.
The doctor said that means one of two things: Either COVID was “an abnormal thing of nature,” or Chinese scientists at the Wuhan lab were “working on coronavirus vaccines,” and they either caught the virus and spread it or it somehow escaped.
“It happens, labs aren’t perfect, people aren’t perfect, we make mistakes and there can be contamination,” she said, noting that because the virus is asymptomatic in some people, “someone working in the lab with one of the strains could’ve caught it and not known they had it.”
Birx said the COVID-19 virus showed signs of being experimented on in a lab. “In laboratories you grow the virus in human cells, allowing it to adapt more. Each time it passes through human cells it becomes more adapted,” she said.
She also said China could have reduced deaths worldwide if it had alerted health leaders that the virus can spread asymptomatically. “China was implying that they were containing it, but asymptomatic spread cannot be contained without testing,” she said.
“I think the world lost several months of preparation because we were thinking there wasn’t that level of human-to-human spread when there clearly was,” the doctor told the Mail.
Although most mainstream news outlets immediately labeled speculation that the virus came from the Wuhan lab as a conspiracy theory, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top U.S. immunologist, eventually conceded that’s a possibility.
Asked during a House hearing in May 2021 whether the virus originated naturally, Fauci said: “I am not convinced about that. I think we should continue to investigate what went on in China until we continue to find out to the best of our ability what happened.”
Joseph Curl has covered politics for 35 years, including 12 years as White House correspondent for a national newspaper. He was also the a.m. editor of the Drudge Report for four years. Send tips to [email protected] and follow him on Twitter @josephcurl.