The world might have to face future pandemics like of Covid-26 and Covid-32 unless we find out where Covid-19 originated, a leading US disease expert said earlier this week.

Peter Hotez, co-director at the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development, said on NBC’s ‘Meet the press’ that it was important to understand the origins of the Covid-19 virus as a lack of understanding of the same puts the world at risk from future outbreaks of similar diseases.

Another leading expert said it was important for China to come clean and cooperate with the world on Covid-19 if future outbreaks of such a magnitude have to be prevented.

Scott Gottlieb, who worked at the United States Food and Drug Administration during the Trump administration and now is on the board of Pfizer Inc, said China has so far failed to provide evidence to disprove information that hints at lab origins of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

According to Gottlieb, the world is beginning to believe in the theory that the novel coronavirus could have escaped from a lab in Wuhan. He said on CBS News’s ‘Face the Nation’ that there is nothing conclusive so far to believe the SARS-CoV-2 virus emerged from wildlife and its outbreak started at a seafood market in China’s Wuhan in December 2019.

The remarks from these two leading disease experts have come in the wake of US President Joe Biden urging for a renewed probe into the origins of the novel coronavirus which triggered arguably the biggest pandemic in modern history.

Biden said US intelligence had so far been not able to conclude whether the virus emerged from the wildlife or it escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Very recently, a leading publication revealed that researchers from the Wuhan lab had sought hospital care in November 2019 for “symptoms consistent with both Covid-19 and common seasonal illness”.

This was over a month before China informed the World Health Organisation about the novel coronavirus outbreak on December 31, 2019.