Chief White House medical adviser Anthony Fauci speculated that China likely got rid of an intermediary host that carried the COVID-19 virus between bats and humans when officials cleaned out the live animal market where the virus is theorized to have first caused an infection in humans.
“It was very likely in a host. What the Chinese did, I don’t have firsthand knowledge of that, but the people who were reporting it, who investigated — what they did is they cleaned out the markets as soon as it turned out that it was clear that there were clusters coming from the market,” Fauci told host Margaret Brennan on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”
“In typical fashion, I think, trying to make sure that things don’t get pointed to them, they probably got rid of the animals that were the intermediary hosts there,” said Fauci, stressing this possibility as a reason further cooperation from China on surveillance in live animal markets is needed.