COVID wet market narrative was a ‘ruse’ to ‘move attention away’ from Wuhan lab: Dr. Robert Redfield
Former CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield reacts to a new report claiming Wuhan lab scientists were the first to contract COVID-19 and weighs in on the pandemic's origins.
Former Centers for Disease Control & Prevention Director Robert Redfield told Fox News he believes Dr. Anthony Fauci's purported disinterest in figuring out the true origins of coronavirus are grounded in his support for one behavior that could have led to it.
Redfield, speaking Wednesday with "America Reports," was asked to respond to comments Fauci made in a February Boston Globe video-interview in which the reporter wondered whether the world will ever know the origins of the microbe.
"Might not — it very well might not — we may not even know, that's unfortunate, but that's the possibility that we might not ever know," Fauci said.
Fauci, now retired from his NIAID directorship, was replaced by immunologist Dr. Hugh Auchincloss, the father of Rep. Jake Auchincloss, D-Mass.
Anchor John Roberts asked Redfield if he believed Fauci seemed dismissive of such an important fact to be found.
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Dr. Anthony Fauci is accompanied by Stephen Colbert to receive his COVID-19 booster shot on October 5, 2022. (CBS)
"Tony and I have been friends for a long time, but I'm very disappointed in how he's responded to this," Redfield said. "Largely, I think it's grounded in his advocacy for gain-of-function research."
"I think, as you know, he's a strong advocate for gain-of-function research, and I'm a strong advocate for a moratorium on gain-of-function research."
Redfield cited a new report from two Twitter files journalists who reported the first three humans to come down with COVID were three scientists involved in gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Hubei, China.
One of them was the monikered "Bat Lady" — Shi Zhengli — while another was reportedly a chief researcher named Ben Hu, according to investigative reporter Matt Taibbi and former independent California gubernatorial candidate Michael Shellenberger.
"The investigative report that you're just talking about suggests that these three scientists were the initial infections in November — although I think there was evidence for infections back in early September also — but it's of note that they were the key scientists that were leading the gain-of-function research in that laboratory," Redfield said.
Redfield called the failure to commence a serious scientific investigation into the dueling hypotheses — a lab leak versus a natural animal-to-human transmission — at the Bethesda, Md.-based National Institutes of Health in early 2020 "one of the biggest disappointments" of the pandemic.
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Members of the World Health Organization (WHO) team investigating the origins of the COVID-19 coronavirus, arrive at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, in Chinas central Hubei province on February 3, 2021. (HECTOR RETAMAL/AFP via Getty Images)
"Unfortunately, very rapidly what happened after Jan. 31… there was a movement to coalesce around a single narrative, which was that this was a natural spillover event."
He said people like himself who wanted to probe the lab leak theory further were called conspiracy theorists, despite his protestations that unilaterally naming one theory to be fact is "antithetical to science."
Science involves rigorous debate, he said, and those with public influence largely tried to crush any debate on the origins of the virus.
"Getting to the answer is critical because in order to have the energy that we're going to need as a society in a world, I think to put limitations on gain-of-function research, we need to understand that is most likely the gain-of-function research led to this pandemic."
Redfield concluded that an even greater pandemic will come one day, saying he believes it will be an avian virus that is spread either through another gain-of-function snafu or via bioterrorism.
"And our best defense against that pandemic is going to be to curtail gain-of-function research."
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