Former CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield says he was “sidelined” from the COVID debate by Dr. Anthony Fauci for having a “different point of view” regarding where the virus originated.
“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,” Redfield said at a hearing of the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic. “And as I say, I was only the CDC director, and I was sidelined.”
From The New York Post:
Redfield, 71, told Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) that his support for the theory that the coronavirus accidentally emerged from a laboratory in Wuhan, China — rather than jumping from animals to humans — likely prompted his exclusion from high-level discussions of the outbreak.
“I think I made it very clear in January [2020] to all of them why we had to aggressively pursue this,” he said. “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 added that he was not aware that Fauci and then-National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins had convened a conference call on Feb. 1, 2020 to discuss the worldwide outbreak until internal emails were published by the Washington Post and Buzzfeed News in June 2021.
“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,” he said.
“Why would they do this?” Comer asked.
“Because I had a different point of view,” Redfield responded. “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.”
He added: “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.”
Watch the clip below:
.@RepMalliotakis: "Why do you think you were excluded?"
Former CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield: "It was told me they wanted a single narrative and that I obviously had a different point of view." pic.twitter.com/Nkt4xWZ6rf
— CSPAN (@cspan) March 8, 2023