Origin of Covid needs full probe

The US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention is America’s universally admired, premier public health body. For more than 70 years it has been on the frontline of putting “science into action to help children stay healthy so they can grow and learn; to help families, businesses and communities fight disease and stay strong; and to protect the public’s health”. Yet, according to startling evidence given to a US congressional committee on Wednesday (Thursday AEDT), when the Covid-19 pandemic began in January 2020 the CDC’s director at the time, Robert Redfield, an eminent virologist, was sidelined from internal debates about the origins of a virus that was to cause America’s and the world’s gravest health crisis in 100 years.

The reason for his exclusion, Dr Redfield told the committee, was that he was an early backer of the Wuhan lab leak theory as the cause of the pandemic. If that is indeed what happened, Dr Redfield’s disclosure is a shocking new development that raises deeply troubling questions about not just the US but the global response to the pandemic.

It demands no less than full investigation and total transparency. Dr Redfield, as America’s top public health official, deserved to be heard and should have been heard. He should have been a key figure in the US and the world response to the virus that emanated from Wuhan. It beggars belief that he was sidelined.

It may be that Dr Redfield, co-founder of the Institute of Human Virology at the University of Maryland school of medicine and a prominent HIV-AIDS researcher, was appointed CDC director by president Donald Trump in 2018. But that should not have been any reason to exclude him, as a leading virology expert, from debates about the origins of Covid-19.

Dr Redfield told the committee formed by the new Republican majority that controls the US House of Representatives to investigate the pandemic that he was sidelined by the White House’s chief medical adviser, Anthony Fauci. Dr Fauci, he said, “did not appreciate” his support for the lab 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,” Dr Redfield said. He had made it clear in January 2020, he said, that he believed the virus accidentally emerged from the Wuhan laboratory rather than by jumping from animals to humans. “I made it clear we had to aggressively pursue this,” he said. “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.”

It was not “scientifically plausible” to him, he said, that the virus had natural origins. “(But) it was told to me that they wanted a single narrative, and that I obviously had a different point of view. Science has debate, and they (quashed) any debate. Science never selects a single narrative. We foster debate. We’re confident that with debate, science will eventually get to the truth.” Yet so vicious was the response to Dr Redfield’s views that not only was he sidelined but he also was vilified as a racist by a Baltimore newspaper for saying that the virus came from a Wuhan lab.

As recent conclusions reached by the US Department of Energy and the FBI have shown, there remains a powerful body of evidence that the origins of the pandemic do, indeed, lie in the Wuhan Institute of Virology laboratory. Neither the theory nor Dr Redfield’s support for it should have been treated in the way they have. It isn’t only US officials who appear to have been unwisely peremptory in dismissing the lab leak theory. Understanding where Covid-19 came from, whether it be a lab leak or transmission from animals to humans, is vital to dealing with the next pandemic, whenever it occurs.

There remains, as the White House has pointed out, no consensus on the origin of Covid-19. That only underlines the overwhelming importance of the scientific community being able to debate freely to establish the truth.