Ex-CDC chief: Fauci 'sidelined' anyone who questioned him on Covid origin

FPI / March 10, 2023

Dr. Anthony Fauci essentially silenced anyone who did not embrace his narrative on the origin of the Covid virus, former CDC Director Robert Redfield told the House Oversight Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic on Wednesday.

Redfield said he was intentionally excluded from conversations on the federal government's response to Covid because he refused to fall in line with the Fauci narrative.

“This was an a priori decision that there’s one point of view that we’re going to put out there, and anyone who doesn’t agree with it is going to be sidelined. And as I say, I was only the CDC director, and I was sidelined,” Redfield said.

Redfield, who is a virologist, testified that he had been vocal as early as January 2020 about his suspicions that Covid had likely originated in a Chinese lab.

“I think I made it very clear to all of them why we had to aggressively pursue this. And I let them know as a virologist that I didn’t see that this was anything like SARS or MERS. … And they knew that was how I was thinking,” Redfield said, adding that it was not long afterward that Fauci began working to exclude him from the conversation.

Redfield pointed to a conference call that took place on Feb. 2, 2020 which included both Fauci and Dr. Francis Collins, then head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Redfield said he was not invited to join and did not learn about the call until a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request resulted in the publication of emails pertaining to the call.

“I didn’t know there was a February 1 conference call until the Freedom of Information came out with the emails, and I was quite upset, as the CDC director, that I was excluded from those discussions,” Redfield said.

Kentucky Republican Rep. James Comer asked Redfield: “Why would they do this?”

Redfield responded: “Because I had a different point of view. And I was told that they had made a decision that they would keep this confidential until they came up with a single narrative — which I will argue is antithetical to science. Science never selects a single narrative. We foster — as my colleagues just said — we foster debate. And we’re confident that with debate, science will eventually get to the truth.”

On Jan. 31, 2020, Dr. Kristian Andersen and Dr. Robert Garry said in an email to Fauci that anomalies in the virus suggested it was not of natural origin. They would backtrack days later under pressure from Fauci.

In his email, Andersen wrote the virus had “unusual features” that “(potentially) look engineered” and that he and other scientists “all find the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory.”

Following the Feb. 1 call, Garry wrote in another email that “I really can’t think of a plausible natural scenario” for the emergence of the virus.

Redfield told House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan that he was excluded from those emails as well.

“Three years ago, if you thought it came from a lab, you got called a nutjob, you got censored on Twitter, you got blacklisted on Twitter,” Jordan said. “You were even called a crackpot by the very same scientists who in late January [2020] sent emails to Dr. Fauci and said it came from a lab. They called you crackpot. Is that right, Dr. Redfield?”

“I think the most upsetting thing to me was the Baltimore Sun calling me a racist because I said this came from a Wuhan lab,” Redfield replied.

A former New York Times science editor also ripped Fauci during Wednesday's hearing for repeatedly seeking to discredit the lab leak theory — just days after newly released emails showed the medical adviser commissioned a paper in February 2020 meant to disprove it.

“Fauci was probably not too pleased to hear that the virus might have escaped from research that his agency had funded,” said Nicholas Wade, who also served as an editor for the journals Nature and Science.

Wade was referring to experiments conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology with funding from the National Institutes of Health and Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which was routed to the Chinese institution through the New York-based EcoHealth Alliance.

The journalist and author pointed the finger of blame squarely at Fauci and Collins: “It’s hard to believe that in the twilight of their long careers, they would seriously mishandle an issue as important as the origin of the COVID virus, yet that is what the evidence seems to point to.”

“The national media swallowed the natural origins story unskeptically, and once committed to it, failed to report important contrary evidence,” he added.

Wade noted that within days of the Feb. 1 conference call, Andersen had repudiated his initial suspicions and stood squarely behind the natural origin theory backed by Fauci.

“Andersen in an email on Feb. 4 … [derided] the lab leak as a crackpot theory,” he said. “What made him change his mind? No new scientific evidence came to light.”

In a Feb. 12, 2020 email released by the select committee on Sunday, Andersen said Fauci and Collins had “prompted” him to write a study to debunk the lab leak theory. The email was submitted with an article on the subject to Nature Medicine.

The article was published five days later and was cited by Fauci from the White House briefing room exactly two months after that — with the top doc never revealing his own role in its creation.



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