Ex-CDC Chief Supported Lab Leak Theory, Gets Firsthand Brush with Thuggish 'Scientists'
It is extraordinary how often we are told to “trust the science” these days when “the science” seems to so clearly coordinate with certain political or ideological agendas.
At the start of the pandemic, a theory emerged that the COVID-19 may have leaked from a lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in the city of Wuhan, China, where the virus originated.
This was bolstered by the fact that the Chinese government told us that the virus was transmitted from bats to humans and the Wuhan institute just so happened to be studying, well, coronaviruses in bats.
So it wasn’t exactly a wild notion that the virus leaked out of a lab.
Yet then-director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Robert Redfield, says he says he was “sidelined” and “threatened” for floating what basic common sense dictates was a rational theory as to the origin of the virus, given the circumstances and what global and domestic officials now say might just be a perfectly reasonable explanation.
Although the World Health Organization maintained an adamant stance for over a year that the virus was most likely passed originally from animal to human, around the same time that CNN reported that Biden administration officials were warming up to the idea, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus admitted top officials had been a bit hasty in dismissing the idea.
Yet it is Redfield who never changed his stance, and was slammed and even threatened for it last year, he says.
“I think what you have seen over the last 18 months is no new evidence to suggest that this evolved from nature. Haven’t seen any evidence of it being associated with any of the animal species they’ve tested, over 80,000 animals,” Redfield told Fox News host Martha MacCallum on Monday, as The Daily Caller reported.
“But we have seen growing evidence to support that this in fact was a consequence of a laboratory leak. So I continue to believe of the two hypotheses that the laboratory leak is the most likely origin of this virus.”
Check out the video of Redfield’s interview here.
As you can understand, Redfield, who left the CDC when Joe Biden became president, said he was “disheartened” to see the scientific community so broadly reject the lab leak theory, a fact I’m sure made all the more so because he was personally maligned for ascribing to it himself.
“And I think I’m very disheartened when I have seen how the scientific community failed to approach both hypotheses with an open mind,” he explained.
“I mean I was very rapidly sidelined, threatened and really sort of outed because I believed as a virologist that this virus may have come from the laboratory.”
Delivering threats to those with hypotheses that buck the mainstream isn’t the behavior most people associate with scientists. But when it comes to the origin of a pandemic that’s killed millions around the world, and arguably was the deciding factor in a brutally divisive presidential election in the United States, what matters is conformity.
And to maintain that conformity, as Redfield learned, even so-called “scientists” were prepared to engage in thuggish behavior.
The former health official recalled that in February, “the scientific community in bulk said the only acceptable answer,” was that of a “natural event from a natural evolution,” adding that both hypotheses should have been taken “seriously.”
It was indeed truly sickening to observe at the start of the pandemic the adamant rush to deny any wrongdoing on the part of the Chinese Communist Party.
These people were defending the authoritarian communist regime that is routinely accused of intellectual property theft from American businesses and private citizens, creating an Orwellian dystopia for its own people, committing genocide against an ethnic minority, and vowing to be in a position of dominance on the world stage by 2035, and they were accusing President Donald Trump and anyone else who shared his stance on the origins of the virus and the manner in which the CCP handled it as “racist” of all things.
It was not merely sharply dismissed by global public health officials and the American legacy media complex, it was actually regarded as “verboten” by our information war overlords in Big Tech to share information that upheld the stance.
Yet now the WHO and Biden administration officials are casually admitting that the whole theory had merit this entire time.
While in March of this year the WHO’s own report on the origins of the virus deemed it to be “extremely unlikely” that the virus originated in a lab, Tedros told reporters in Geneva last month that there had been a “premature push” to dismiss it.
He even went as far as to say that he knows from personal experience that “accidents happen.”
“I was a lab technician myself, I’m an immunologist, and I have worked in the lab, and lab accidents happen,” Tedros said, as NPR reported. “It’s common.”
“We need information, direct information on what the situation of this lab was before and at the start of the pandemic,” he also said, urging China’s cooperation. “If we get full information, we can exclude” the lab connection.
Within the same week, CNN published a report that stated that Biden officials were beginning to consider the hotly disputed lab leak theory as viable.
“Senior Biden administration officials overseeing an intelligence review into the origins of the coronavirus now believe the theory that the virus accidentally escaped from a lab in Wuhan is at least as credible as the possibility that it emerged naturally in the wild — a dramatic shift from a year ago, when Democrats publicly downplayed the so-called lab leak theory,” CNN reported at the time.
So when President Donald Trump was in office and he and his officials floated the lab leak theory, they were broadly dismissed of not only errancy but actual racism.
Now, when the WHO chief and the safely-installed Biden establishment administration affirm that there’s viability to this theory, they’re regarded as authoritative and reasonable and the media reports on their change of heart quite soberly with none of the criticism regarded for Trump-linked supporters of the theory.
Can you even imagine how very different things might have turned out the whole world over had the “scientists” treated this theory as viable?
The Chinese Communist Party clearly had no interest in either transparency or honesty with the global community about the nature of the virus and very likely contributed directly to its spread around the world.
This could have turned into a complete and total disaster for Beijing, had the global community more closely scrutinized the origins of the virus and found President Xi Jinping’s government distinctly culpable to some degree. Yet many of the authorities who could have held China accountable were emphatically refuting the idea that it was possible that Chinese human error — or even malice — could have been behind the emergence of the novel coronavirus.
Let that sink in.
If there’s ever been a reason we need to dismantle the idea that “the science” and the health officials that cite it need to stop being protected from criticism by totalitarian censorship, now is that time.
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