Former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield doubled down on his hypothesis that COVID-19 came from a Wuhan lab while expressing “disappointment” in scientists such as Dr. Anthony Fauci for their “lack of openness” to investigating the theory.
Redfield made the comments during a 2-hour long interview with Fox News Medical Contributor Marc Siegel. “A year and a half ago Dr. Robert Redfield, then-CDC Director, had a hypothesis about the emerging virus. So did Dr. Anthony Fauci. Redfield felt that evidence pointed to a lab manipulation and a leak, and Fauci didn’t,” Siegel summarized.
Clips from the interview reveal Redfield backing the hypothesis that COVID-19 originated in a Wuhan lab, as he similarly claimed during a CNN interview in March. “There’s an alternative hypothesis that it went from a bat virus, got into a laboratory where, in the laboratory, it was taught, educated, it evolved, so that it became a virus that could efficiently transmit human-to-human,” he reiterates in the Fox interview.
“In my professional opinion as a virologist, that’s the hypothesis that I support,” he adds before singling out Fauci for subscribing to the COVID-19 “natural origins” theory:
Other individuals, Tony Fauci, for example, would say that he prefers to support that it evolved from nature.
During the interview, where Redfield reveals he had a “higher-level security clearance” than other members on the COVID-19 task force, he asserts that “Tony is holding onto this hypothesis tightly.”
“Now, why would that be?” he asks before noting that “sometimes scientists when they bite into a bone on a hypothesis, it’s hard for them to move on.” “I guess if I’m disappointed about anything about the early scientific community it’s that there seemed to be lack of openness to pursue both hypotheses,” he concludes before slamming the World Health Organization’s COVID-19 investigation as “compromised.”
