Robert Redfield, the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention under Donald Trump, told CNN that he believe the coronavirus pandemic started in a Wuhan, China research lab, a conspiracy theory that has largely been dismissed by researchers.

“Most of us in a lab, when trying to grow a virus, we try to help make it grow better, and better, and better, and better, and better, and better so we can do experiments and figure out about it. That’s the way I put it together,” Redfield told CNN’s Sanjay Gupta.

The idea that the SARS CoV-2 virus has largely been debunked:  the World Health Organization has called that origin story “extremely unlikely.”  Numerous epidemiologists in the US and abroad have dismissed the idea. 

Redfield was careful not to state that the virus was intentionally released from the lab, noting that the first cases of the coronavirus likely circulated through China as early as September or October 2019, months before it reached US shores.  Redfield also does not believe that the virus jumped from animals to humans; instead, it had to be artificially engineered.

“I do not believe this somehow came from a bat to a human. And at that moment in time, the virus 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 zoonot to human, it takes a while for it to figure out how to become more and more efficient,” Redfield asserted.