Former foreign-policy official David Asher said Friday the coronavirus was “optimized for transmission between humans” in a way no bat-borne infectious-disease ever had been, leading him to believe an animal-based origin of the disease was almost impossible.
“It came out of nowhere, and it was optimized for transmission between humans in a way that no bat-borne coronavirus ever had been. So what’s up? A pangolin gets mated with a bat gets mated with a furin cleavage site of a human being? How does that happen? It’s not probable. In fact, it was statistically 1 in 13 million to 1 in 13 billion, when I talked to our bio-statisticians,” he told “The Story.”
The virus’ true origins remain unknown, but the possibility it accidentally leaked from a Wuhan lab known for its risky coronavirus experiments has gained increasing credence in recent months. The Wuhan Institute of Virology has conducted so-called “gain of function” research, which involves modifying a virus to make it more infectious among humans.
Former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield said in March that he believed the virus most likely escaped from a lab, pointing to how efficiently it transmitted.
“I have spent my life in virology,” he told CNN. “I do not believe this somehow came from a bat to a human. And at that moment in time, the virus that came to the human became one of the most infectious viruses that we know in humanity for human to human transmission. Normally when a pathogen goes from a zoonotic to human, it takes a while for it to figure out how to become more and more efficient in humans, human transmission. I just don’t think this makes biological sense.”
Asher, a contractor for the State Department during the Trump administration, told Fox News on Thursday that the government probe he led last year into the origins of the infectious-disease found practically no evidence COVID-19 originated from nature. He said that while he welcomed the new intelligence probe into the virus’ origins ordered by joe-biden” target=”_blank”>President Biden<
Asher helped draft the Trump State Department memo released Jan. 15 that said the Wuhan Institute of Virology was not a merely civilian institution and had collaborated on secret projects with the Chinese military since 2017.
“We had very definitive information, only a bit of which we put out publicly, that showed they were engaged in this classified, secret effort to develop these super viruses and that it appeared it had spilled out of that laboratory,” he said. “That was the only plausible information that we were presented.”
Asher said the National Institutes of Health and CDC wouldn’t provide proof that the virus originated from nature, calling it a “joke.”
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Asher’s investigation came out of the State Department’s arms control and verification (AVC) bureau and initially launched at the request of former Trump Secretary of State Mike Pompeo before ending this year.
Fox News’ Tyler Olson contributed to this report.
