Former CDC director Robert Redfield believes COVID-19 was developed in a lab and leaked out, causing one of the worst pandemics in modern history.
He says the work was done in order to make the virus more transmissible from human to human.
“When I said before that I didn’t think it was biologically plausible that COVID-19 went from a bat to some unknown animal into man and now had become one of the most infectious viruses,” Redfield told Fox News.
“That’s not consistent with how other coronaviruses have come into the human species. And, it does suggest that 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.”
The lab-leak hypothesis has been challenged by China and other health experts, including top U.S. virologist Dr. Anthony Fauci.
“I feel this way. I haven’t changed. Most of the scientists I know feel that way, that the most likely origin is a natural origin from an animal reservoir to human. However, we have not ruled out the possibility that there could have been a leak from the lab,” Fauci said on MSNBC.
During the end of May, President Joe Biden tasked U.S. intelligence to look back into the origins of the virus.
Compromised by China?
Redfield said he believed the World Health Organization (WHO) to be too compromised to conduct a thorough investigation on China.
The final WHO report on the investigation was inconclusive on the origins of COVID-19.
Redfield also stressed how disappointed he was with the lack of openness from the medical community.
“I’m just giving my best opinion as a virologist, and I don’t think it’s plausible that this virus went from a bat to an animal — we still don’t know that animal — and then went into humans and immediately had learned how to be human-to-human transmissible to the point of now causing one of the greatest pandemics we’ve had in the history of the world,” Redfield said.
Redfield served as CDC director from 2018 to 2021, during the Trump administration.
