Gottlieb says COVID origins may never be known, urges intelligence gathering to spot future pandemics
CBSN
As officials seek to understand how the coronavirus pandemic emerged, one expert says that without more information from China, the world may never know.
"Either we find the intermediate host -- the animal that spread COVID -- or there's a whistleblower inside China. Or someone close to this, who knows that this came out of a lab, comes forward, defects, goes overseas, or we intercept some communication that we shouldn't have had access to. Absent something like that, we're not going to be able to answer this question" says Scott Gottlieb, who served as F.D.A. Commissioner under former President Trump.
"This is going to be a battle of competing narratives," Gottlieb told "Face the Nation" moderator Margaret Brennan in an exclusive interview airing Sunday about his upcoming book: "Uncontrolled Spread: Why COVID-19 Crushed Us and How We Can Defeat the Next Pandemic".
Two Native Hawaiian brothers who were convicted in the 1991 killing of a woman visiting Hawaii allege in a federal lawsuit that local police framed them "under immense pressure to solve the high-profile murder" then botched an investigation last year that would have revealed the real killer using advancements in DNA technology.
In one of his first acts after returning to the Oval Office this week, President Trump tasked federal agencies with developing ways to potentially ease prices for U.S. consumers. But experts warn that his administration's crackdown on immigration could both drive up inflation as well as hurt a range of businesses by shrinking the nation's workforce.
Meta is denying claims circulating on social media that it forced Facebook and Instagram users to follow President Trump's official accounts, saying the changes some users noticed were standard practices tied to the transition of the POTUS account from the previous administration to the incoming one.