Chinese virologist Tong Yigang has denied the rhetoric claiming the virus that caused the COVID-19 pandemic could have been leaked from a lab. He says it's an easy story to tell by people who are not experts in virology. CGTN interviews Tong Yigang, the co-leader of the WHO-China joint team's animals and environment group and professor at Beijing University of Chemical Technology, they discussed some of the most popular hypotheses about COVID-19's origins.
Tong Yigang: The report said that they used different methods and got the same conclusion. The animals did have COVID-19 antibodies, meaning they had been infected by COVID-19. There’s no doubt about that. This report has several meanings. First, it found another animal susceptible to COVID that we were not aware of. Second, the epidemic was first found in China. We did lots of work, and tested animals in different regions, different species in the country. But we didn’t find a sequence of the virus in wild animals, even a virus very close to it. But the virus found in these white-tailed deer was the SARS-CoV-2. So we wonder whether these deer carried the virus earlier.