"Pure Baloney": Zoologist Debunks Trump's COVID-19 Origin Theory, Explains Animal-Human Transmission
by mail@democracynow.org (Democracy Now!) from Democracy Now! on (#527ZE)
With the largest one-day death toll in the U.S. yet - 2,400 in just 24 hours - President Trump is trying to deflect attention from his handling of the pandemic by waging a war on public health experts and science, threatening to cut World Health Organization funding and fueling a theory that the coronavirus came from a lab in Wuhan, China. We speak to a zoologist who has been sounding the alarm about a coming pandemic for years. "The idea that this virus escaped from a lab is just pure baloney," says Peter Daszak, disease ecologist and the president of EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit that works globally to identify and study our vulnerabilities to emerging infectious disease. "These pandemic viruses that emerge originate in wildlife."