Dr. Anthony Fauci “sidelined” Dr. Robert Redfield from internal discussions about the cause of COVID-19 at the beginning of the pandemic, according to the former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Redfield said the former White House chief medical adviser did not like Redfield’s support for the so-called “lab leak theory.”
“This was an a priori decision that there’s one point of view that we’re going to put out there, and anyone who doesn’t agree with it is going to be sidelined,” Redfield said at a hearing of the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic. “And as I say, I was only the CDC director, and I was sidelined.”
Redfield, 71, informed Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) that his disqualification from high-level discussions of the outbreak was probably due to his support for the hypothesis that the coronavirus accidentally emerged from a laboratory in Wuhan, China rather than jumping from animals to humans.
“Virus’s “odd features” could “(possibly) look designed”: Robert Redfield
“I think I made it very clear in January [2020] to all of them why we had to aggressively pursue this,” he said. “And I let them know as a virologist that I didn’t see that this was anything like SARS or MERS. … And they knew that was how I was thinking.”
Redfield stated that until internal emails were made public by the Washington Post and Buzzfeed News in June 2021, he was unaware that Fauci and the then-National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins had held a conference call on February 1, 2020, to discuss the global outbreak.
“I didn’t know there was a February 1 conference call until the Freedom of Information came out with the emails, and I was quite upset, as the CDC director, that I was excluded from those discussions,” he said.
“Why would they do this?” Comer asked.
“Because I had a different point of view,” Redfield responded. “And I was told that they had made a decision that they would keep this confidential until they came up with a single narrative — which I will argue is antithetical to science.”
He added: “Science never selects a single narrative. We foster — as my colleagues just said — we foster debate. And we’re confident that with debate, science will eventually get to the truth.”
Drs. Kristian Andersen and Robert Garry had sent Dr. Anthony Fauci an email on January 31, 2020, the day before the call, pointing up irregularities in the virus that suggested it was not of natural origin. Nevertheless, they later changed their minds under Fauci’s insistence.
Andersen said in his email that the virus’s “odd features” could “(possibly) look designed” and that he and other researchers “all find the genome discordant with expectations from evolutionary theory.”
Garry stated in another email that “I just can’t think of a credible natural scenario” for the genesis of the virus after the call on February 1.
“Three years ago, if you thought it came from a lab, you got called a nutjob, you got censored on Twitter, you got blacklisted on Twitter,” Jordan said. “You were even called a crackpot by the very same scientists who in late January [2020] sent emails to Dr. Fauci and said it came from a lab. They called you crackpot. Is that right, Dr. Redfield?”
“I think the most upsetting thing to me was the Baltimore Sun calling me a racist because I said this came from a Wuhan lab,” Redfield replied.