Robert Redfield, who served as the director of the CDC under President Donald Trump, has claimed that the COVID-19 virus could have started as part of a secret biodefense program in a North Carolina lab.
Redfield, a longtime critic of Dr. Anthony Fauci and supporter of the lab leak theory that the virus stemmed from China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology, told the Third Opinion podcast that the virus was “intentionally engineered as a part of a biodefense program.”
And now, he believes that it may not have necessarily been created in China and that those in Wuhan might have simply been trying to cope with the situation once they realized the ramifications of it.
Either way, he believes the role played by the U.S. was “substantial,” citing the fact that the government funded research through the NIH, Department of Defense and USAID.
He said that Dr. Ralph Baric, a University of North Carolina coronavirologist, is the “scientific mastermind” behind the whole situation. Although he can’t prove anything, he believes he may have had a hand in developing some of the original viral lines.
Baric collaborated on gain-of-function research with top coronavirologist Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, with some of their experiments being conducted at Baric’s Chapel Hill lab. Shi’s team in Wuhan went on to use Baric’s research techniques in work that was partly funded by research grants from the U.S. One of the techniques pioneered by Baric enables researchers to splice different components of viruses together in a manner that leaves no trace of what was done.
Baric told congressional investigators that he had serious reservations about the biosafety protocols in Chinese labs and that he believed a lab leak was a possible cause of the pandemic. He testified that he advised Shi to work in a more secure lab that had a biosafety level 3 designation, but she did not follow his suggestion. Therefore, he said that a lab accident could not be ruled out given the insufficient biosafety level of the lab where she was conducting the work.
The lab leak theory was criticized in the early days of the pandemic, with the mainstream media and some academics even going so far as to mock those who supported it and claim it was nothing more than a conspiracy theory.
However, the theory has become widely accepted recently as evidence continues to mount, including reports of how Wuhan lab workers got seriously ill with COVID-like symptoms back in November 2019.
Redfield said that the ability of COVID-19 to spread so rapidly among humans made it quite different from other coronaviruses and believes that treating it the same as SARS in the early days of the pandemic was a “critical error.”
He said that he should have tried harder to gain access for the CDC to the Wuhan lab and that the World Health Organization was “highly compromised” by China.
Redfield also supports the idea of RFK, Jr. serving in a public health role
Redfield has also gone on the record supporting the idea of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. serving as the head of the Department of Health and Human Services. He said in an interview that he does not agree with liberals’ claims that he will introduce anti-vaccine policies.
“Kennedy is not antivaccine. What Kennedy is about is transparency about vaccines, honest discussion about vaccines, asking for the data to show that these vaccines are safe and they’re efficacious,” he said.
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