Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Robinson. I am the editor-in-chief of Current Affairs Magazine. My guest today is Professor Jeffrey Sachs.

He serves as the Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University,

and he chaired the Lancet's COVID-19 Commission.

Professor Sachs, thank you so much for joining us on Current Affairs.

Pleasure to be with you. Thank you.

I want to quote something that you said recently.

You said, I chaired a commission for the Lancet for two years on COVID.

I'm pretty convinced it came out of the U.S. lab biotechnology, not out of nature.

Just to mention after two years of intensive work on this,

so it's a blunder, in my view, of biotech, not an accident of a natural spillover.

We don't know for sure. I should be absolutely clear. But there's enough evidence that it should be looked into,

and it's not being investigated,

not in the United States, not anywhere.

And I think for real reasons that they don't want to look

underneath the, uh, underneath the, uh, the, uh, the, the, the

the statement that you made there, made there is a controversial one.

And just to read a couple of quotes from the New York Times recently, I mean, it goes in the

face of, I mean, USA, you're pretty convinced and there's enough evidence.

The stuff that we're reading in the newspapers is things like a group of

scientists present a review saying that a natural spillover from animal to human is far more likely

cause of the pandemic than a laboratory incident. There's a pair of studies saying that the

live animal market in Wuhan is the origin of the coronavirus pandemic.

...