Former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Robert Redfield sounded off Wednesday following testimony before a House subcommittee on the origins of the coronavirus pandemic.
Redfield, a virologist who served in the post under President Trump, reacted to statements from Committee Member Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, who said Redfield had not been allowed – despite being the head of CDC – on a conference call that included equally high-profile health care bureaucrats Drs. Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins.
"They obviously had a conversation on February 1st [2020], and then I think several [there]after," Redfield told "The Story."
"Previously, they had this group of scientists that thought that the virus did not look like it was a virus that evolved in nature. And then within 3-to-4 days, they changed their point of view."
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Redfield acknowledged critics claiming the scientists' change of heart could have been driven by reports they later received substantial funding from the NIH – then led by Collins, but said he personally doesn't believe the alleged link.
Instead, Redfield said the key issue is that there was no new scientific data within the intervening days.
"I think what bothers me about it the most and I've said this before, that the approach they took was antithetical to science," he said.
Redfield said he had discussed COVID origin hypotheses with Fauci, British tropical disease scholar Sir Jeremy Farrar, and Eritrea-born public health expert Dr. Tedros Ghebreyesus – the current head of the World Health Organization.
He told the global experts both the lab leak and natural-origin hypothesis should be investigated, and that science should be at the root of what leads to the ultimate designation.
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"I let them understand my own thinking as a virologist that I thought the evidence was definitely in favor of a lab leak. And again, that was very disappointing to me to learn when the [FOIA request] came out months later that they had had these calls and that I was totally excluded from all of them," Redfield said.
He added that while China does deserve a lot of scrutiny in terms of the pandemic, the U.S. health bureaucracy and the European scientific community also were involved in medical research he believes led to "the greatest pandemic of our time."
During Wednesday's hearing, chaired by Rep. Brad Wenstrup, R-Ohio, a medical doctor himself, Redfield was joined by a handful of other experts including former New York Times science editor Nicholas Wade, who was subject to the most contentious part of the session.
Rep. Kweisi Mfume, D-Md., accused Wade – who is a supporter of the lab leak theory – of holding racist beliefs via a book he wrote on human genomics.
While the Baltimore Democrat refused to yield to Wade's attempts to rebut the allegations, Wenstrup later allowed Wade two minutes to respond after Mfume's time expired.
Wade, who appeared this week on "Life, Liberty & Levin," denied the racism allegation and said the controversy was a distraction from the issue at hand.
