Former Centers for Disease Control (CDC) Director Robert Redfield explained why he thinks the CCP virus came from a Chinese lab (the Wuhan Institute of Virology or WIV), echoing support for the theory that was dismissed by media and politicians as having no scientific merit and not worth investigating.
The former CDC director sat down with Dr. Marc Siegel, a professor at NYU and Fox News contributor, to discuss the pandemic’s origins.
The director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and the government’s voice of scientific authority on the pandemic before and during the pandemic, Dr. Anthony Fauci, has long argued that the virus came from an animal market in Wuhan China and not a lab leak.
Until last month, the infectious disease expert had maintained that COVID-19 had developed naturally. Fauci told National Geographic in May 2020 that there’s no scientific evidence that the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus was made in a lab.
“Everything about the stepwise evolution over time strongly indicates that [this virus] evolved in nature and then jumped species,” Fauci told the publication at the time.
“The statement from last year was completely false,” Adm. Brett Giroir, former Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) assistant secretary, told Fox News. “There was no pattern of mutations that suggest that it went right from an animal in a natural situation to humans—and there’s still no evidence to show that. So that statement was completely wrong.”
Redfield argued that the COVID-19 virus has a much faster rate of transmission than other lethal coronaviruses such as SARS and MERS which have been found to spread through animals and at a much slower rate.
“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,” Redfield said.
BY MASOOMA HAQ
