Geopolitical expert calls for transparency from China on COVID-19 origins – CBS News

MICHAEL MORELL: Can we walk through all the possibilities here for where this thing came from? 

JAMIE METZL: One possibility is there was a virus that went straight from bats to humans. Maybe a bat bit somebody, maybe somebody in a market was cutting up a bat and got blood into a cut. That’s option one. Option two is that there was a series of jumps from bats through intermediate hosts, like pangolins or civets, and then that virus mutated in that environment and then ultimately reached humans. Number three, which the Chinese government is promoting, which makes not much sense to me, but that there was some kind of virus that got stuck in some frozen food somewhere and was shipped to Wuhan. That seems very low likelihood to me. 

MICHAEL MORELL: You mean from outside of China? 

JAMIE METZL: Outside of China. But that’s what the Chinese government is saying, that it may have started someplace else and it got sent in a frozen package to China. I think it’s ridiculous, but let’s leave that on the table as a possibility. Number four is the possibility, I call it the likely possibility, of an accidental lab leak. 

via www.cbsnews.com