Considering the lab leak as a possibility, Dr. Tom Frieden, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said in an interview that the report should be a call to action to improve lab safety.
Frieden said there have been far too many accidents and near misses at labs across the world. In the late 1970s, he said, the Soviet Union may have accidentally released a flu virus that spread globally. In the same era, a smallpox infection killed a lab worker in the U.K. The SARS virus escaped from a lab in 2004 and killed one person. And under his own watch at the CDC, there were several near misses, he said.
"Regardless of what happened in China or did not happen in China, we need safer laboratories," he said.
Most scientists say the virus probably arose in animals and jumped into humans, because that's happened many, many times before.
Rabies transmits from an animal bite. Simian immunodeficiency virus first arose in monkeys before transforming into HIV. Ebola is believed to come from wild animals, perhaps from eating bush meat.
Similar viruses to SARS-CoV-2 – severe acute respiratory syndrome and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome – are known to have jumped from animals. In the case of SARS, the virus is believed to have arrived in humans via bats, then civets; for MERS, camels are the intermediary, though it probably emerged in bats, too.
The team examined 80,000 samples from wildlife, livestock and poultry across China and 900 swabs from the seafood market where the first outbreak was known to have occurred, but it found no telltale signatures of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
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