A top virologist who helped steer China’s efforts to control the COVID-19 pandemic has contradicted the official party line from Beijing that the virus could not have originated from a lab leak. “You can always suspect anything. That's science. Don't rule out anything,” Prof. George Gao told the BBC for a podcast into the origin of the disease. Chinese officials have always rejected suggestions the SARS-CoV-2 virus might have escaped from a laboratory in the city of Wuhan, where the pandemic started. Gao, who retired last year as head of China’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told the BBC there had been an official investigation of the lab in question, although his organization was not involved. “I think their conclusion is that they are following all the protocols. They haven’t found wrongdoing,” he said. The Oxford-educated Gao came to be considered something of a loose cannon in official Chinese circles during the pandemic after criticizing Chinese vaccines and suggesting in an interview that Beijing would have to relax its zero-COVID policy—well before it eventually did so.