Brittany Bernstein of National Review Online reports one science leader’s concerns about another’s actions during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Former CDC director Robert Redfield testified Wednesday that Dr. Anthony Fauci’s suppression of the Covid-19 lab leak theory was “antithetical to science.”
Redfield testified before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic on Wednesday that he believed very early on that the virus looked engineered.
He said he had several calls with Fauci, WHO chief scientist Jeremy Farrar, and WHO director Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus in which he “expressed as a clinical virologist that I felt it was not scientifically plausible that this virus went from a bat to humans and became one of the most infectious viruses that we have in humans.”
He posited that he was excluded from later calls with the trio “because it was told to me that they wanted a single narrative and that I obviously had a different point of view.”
The hearing comes days after the subcommittee revealed that Fauci “prompted” a scientific study in February 2020 that purported to debunk the lab-leak theory. A memo from the committee suggests “the authors of this paper skewed available evidence to achieve that goal, and Dr. Jeremy Farrar went uncredited despite significant involvement.”
On February 1, Fauci held a call with several scientists to discuss the origins of the virus. During the call, a group of evolutionary virologists suggested that Covid may have stemmed from a lab accident and may have been genetically engineered, according to the memo.
Just three days later, four of the experts who attended that meeting wrote a paper, later published in Nature Medicine, that argued Covid had “mutations” that supported the explanation that it had been transmitted to humans from animals.
Asked Wednesday whether the authors of the study could have uncovered new information between February 1 and February 4, Redfield said he was excluded from those conversations.
