Two leading US disease experts have said that if we don’t fully understand the origins of COVID-19, there is going to be COVID-26 and COVID-32. They said that the Chinese government needs to cooperate with the world to trace the origins of COVID-19 to prevent future pandemic threats, according to a report by Bloomberg.

Claims that supports the theory that the SARS-CoV-2 virus might have escaped from a lab in China’s Wuhan have increased, Scott Gottlieb, a Food and Drug Administration commissioner during the Trump administration, said.

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Gottlieb, who now sits on the board of Pfizer Inc, on CBS News’s ‘Face the Nation’ said that China has not provided any evidence that disproves the theory and added that there are no signs that say that the COVID-19 virus emerged from wildlife. 

Co-director of the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development, Peter Hotez, said that the world is still at risk of future outbreaks if we will not know from where the pandemic started.

“There’s going to be COVID-26 and COVID-32 unless we fully understand the origins of COVID-19,” Hotez said on NBC’s ‘Meet the press’.

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He said, “We need a team of scientists, epidemiologists, virologists, bat ecologists in Hubei province for a six-month, year-long period,” Bloomberg reported.

The outbreak of COVID-19 was first reported in China’s Wuhan in December 2019 and nearly a year-and-a-half after that, the origin of the disease remains obscure. Many researchers believe and have hypothesised that the virus has most likely spread from wild animals to humans. 

However, Republicans have widely promoted that the idea that the novel coronavirus accidentally escaped from a research lab.

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The debate over the origin of the virus was further fuelled after a recent report said that scientists at Wuhan Institute of Virology, China had sought hospital care for “symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illness” in November 2019.