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Businessman Bill Gates affirmed that COVID-19 originated from contact with bats and ruled out the theory that the virus escaped from a laboratory. That hypothesis has gained support because of the Chinese government’s lack of transparency in the research.
“It’s quite clear in this case, [COVID] came across through animals. And almost all our diseases, like HIV, crossed over from chimpanzees in Africa quite some time ago; Ebola came from bats, this also, with one step in between came across from bats,” Gates told Trevor Noah during an interview on The Daily Show.
Bill Gates on investing in labs
However, Bill Gates assured that it is necessary to invest in safe laboratories that allow the advancement of science and research of different diseases. Despite Gates’ claims about the origin of the virus, in November 2021 the news was that in 2018 China experimented with coronaviruses in a laboratory located in Wuhan.
According to a passage from the e-book “Chaos Under Heaven: Trump, Xi, and the Battle for the Twenty-First Century,” adapted for an article in POLITICO media outlet, in 2018 diplomats confirmed that China was experimenting with coronaviruses in a city laboratory. What’s more, the experiments were conducted in a risky manner because the lab did not meet all necessary safety standards.
El American reported that information provided by U.S. officials revealed that Chinese researchers found a population of bats lying in caves in Yunnan province. This discovery “allowed them to understand how SARS coronaviruses originated and spread”.
