‘US helped fund Covid-19’: ex CDC director Robert Redfield

Former CDC director Robert Redfield tells Congress top US health officials deliberately tried to quash the ‘lab leak theory’.

Former CDC chief Robert Redfield has told congress the US government likely helped fund the development of Sars-Cov2, which he believed leaked from a Chinese laboratory in late 2019, ultimately killing more than six million ­people globally.

Dr Redfield, director of the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention from 2018 to 2021, told the first hearing of a congressional committee investigating the origin of Covid-19 he had believed since January 2020 that Sars-Cov2 ­likely leaked from the Wuhan ­virology lab owing to its extreme infectiousness in humans.

Asked on Wednesday (Thursday AEDT) by Republican representative Nicole Malliotakis whether “American tax dollars funded the gain of function ­research that created this virus”, Dr Redfield replied: “I think it did. Not only from the NIH but from the State Department, US AID and from DoD.” He was referring to the National Institute of Health, the US Agency for International Development and the Department of Defence.

Since the Covid-19 pandemic emerged in early 2020, researchers have debated the origin of the novel virus and whether the US government under the auspices of former National Institute of ­Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Anthony Fauci had provided funding to the Chinese lab for potentially dangerous gain of function research.

“As a clinical virologist I felt it was not scientifically plausible that this virus went from a bat to humans and became one of the most infectious viruses we have for humans,” Dr Redfield told the committee.

His testimony came a week after revelations the FBI and the US Department of Energy had ­assessed the lab leak theory – once dubbed a “conspiracy theory” – to be the most likely explanation for the origin of the pandemic.

“You look at those two departments, the FBI and the Energy Department have the strongest scientific footprint of any of our ­intelligence agencies,” Dr Redfield said.

Appointed by the Trump ­administration to the coronavirus taskforce in January 2020, Dr Redfield said he had been sidelined early on by Dr Fauci and NIH head Francis Collins, who, he said, wanted to “create a narrative” the virus emerged naturally.

“This was a narrative that was decided that they were going to say this came from a wet market and they were going to do everything they could to support it and negate any discussion about the possibility that this came from a lab,” he said. “If you really want to be truthful, it’s antithetical to science; science says debate and they squashed any debate … it was told to me that they wanted a single narrative and that I obviously had a different point of view.”

Dr Redfield’s testimony also came a week after the committee, established after Republicans took control of the House of Representatives in January, revealed evidence suggesting Dr Fauci himself had commissioned the ­research he used in February 2020 to discredit claims a lab leak was a reasonable explanation for the outbreak.

The two hours of testimony and questioning by Democrat and Republican representatives of four expert witnesses on Wednesday centred on private emails from top US scientists to Dr Fauci in late January 2020, which suggested the new virus “looked engineered”, and what may have prompted their about-face.

On February 4, four of those scientists among a group of 11, who had convened on a confidential conference call organised by Dr Fauci, from which Dr Redfield was excluded, claimed the lab leak idea was not feasible in a draft academic paper that became the “Proximal Origin of Sars-Cov2”, published in March.

“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,” Dr Redfield said.

One of the witnesses, Nicholas Wade, a former editor of Nature, said the media had been “used” to establish the natural origin theory.

He also said the scientists who seemingly changed their minds over the course of a few days later received a $US9m grant from Dr Fauci’s NIAID in May 2020. ­

Another witness, Jamie Metzl, said the idea the virus emerged from wet markets was never the most logical explanation.

“I think a lot of Americans had this vision of Wuhan as some little market town where a bunch of ­yokels are eating bats for dinner every night, but Wuhan is China’s Chicago; it’s an incredibly sophisticated, highly educated, wealthy city,” he said.

“I’m a lifelong Democrat. I consider myself a progressive person, but … I couldn’t find the justification for the strong arguments, calling people like me, investigating looking into pandemic origins in good faith, conspiracy theorists.”