This is CBSI in the world. I'm John Batsworth, Dr. Henry Miller, a physician. Henry is the

Glenn Swagger Distinguished Fellow at the American Council on Science and Health, writing

about the animal kingdom and the reservoir of COVID-19 in animals around us. Henry,

accompanying your piece is a photograph of a woman feeding a what appears to be a doe,

a whitetail deer doe, which are numerous in the woods of New England and across America.

Is that any way up of risk while we're seeing a hand feeding of a doe?

Well, that's a good question, John. This is all a matter of probabilities as we've been

discussing now for several years. The basic issue is that SARS-CoV-2 virus is very widespread

in the whitetail deer community in the US and Canada. There are more than 30 million

of these animals in the US alone. So they're harboring the virus, often being asymptomatic.

Unfortunately, to this point, there has not been any animal to human transmission.

That's of course one concern. The greater concern by far is that there will be

animal to human transmission of a variant that's capable of human to human transmission.

That may well be what happened in Wuhan originally. As you know, there's still debate about

whether the virus originated in the lab or we think more likely in one of the markets

where there was transmission from an animal to humans. That virus was capable of human to human

transmission. That was the beginning of this terrible fiasco that we've experienced.

That's not at all uncommon. We talk about that being spillover, the transmission of a pathogen from

an animal to a human. We're concerned about that. What do we do about that? Well,

we do care for surveillance of newly spreading variants of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

We need to keep developing new treatments and have vaccine platforms ready.

Again, that gets us back to the chassis that we spoke about earlier so that we can put on

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