Former CDC director says he has been ‘sidelined’ and ‘threatened’ for taking lab leak theory seriously

Former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) director Robert Redfield told Fox News host Martha MacCallum he was “sidelined” and “threatened” for taking the disease seriously. theory of laboratory leaks when the pandemic began.

As of January 2020, dominant theories about the origin of the new coronavirus were that it was jumping for species or leaking from a lab. Redfield said there was growing evidence to support the theory that SARS-CoV-2 came from a lab.

“I think what you’ve seen over the past 18 months is not new evidence to suggest that it evolved from nature. I haven’t seen any evidence that it’s associated with any of the animal species they tested, over 80,000 animals, ”he explained. “But we’ve seen more and more evidence to back it up that this was actually a consequence of a lab leak. So I continue to believe from both hypotheses that the laboratory leak is the most likely origin of this virus. “

Redfield, who was one of the first scientists to say the pandemic likely originated in a lab, said it was “in a way tragic” to say the pandemic was caused by science and not by nature. (RELATED: Washington Post Edits 15 Month Old Headline That Claimed COVID-19 Lab Leak Theory ‘Already Debunked’)

“And I think I was very disheartened when I saw how the scientific community failed to approach both hypotheses with an open mind,” said the former CDC director. “I mean I was very quickly sidelined, threatened and really kind of exposed because I believed as a virologist that this virus could have come from the lab.”

Redfield also told Vanity Fair in June that he had received death threats from fellow scientists for his support of the lab leak theory. He expressed disappointment that both sides of the argument were not approached with equal merit in early 2020.

“The scientific community en masse said that the only acceptable response in February was that it was a natural event of natural evolution,” he added. “And I think that’s what’s sad because science should have taken both hypotheses seriously and looked at them scientifically.”