Robert Redfield, an infectious disease expert who led the US public health body during the pandemic, has accused American and British intelligence agencies of orchestrating a clandestine campaign to shut down concerns over a possible laboratory leak in China. In an exclusive interview with The Mail on Sunday, Redfield claims that he is now “100%” convinced that Covid-19 was the result of scientists becoming infected while carrying out high-risk experiments to boost the infectivity of bat viruses amid low biosecurity in laboratories in the city of Wuhan. He believes that Anthony Fauci, former presidential adviser and one of America’s most influential doctors, worked with the heads of US and UK research funding bodies to push a now-debunked theory of natural transmission from animals on sale in the Wuhan wet market to humans.
Redfield also fears security services secretly “pulled a lot of the strings” to protect their agents inside China’s military-linked laboratories, pointing to Fauci’s ties with intelligence since 2004 while running the $38bn US biosecurity programme. The role of the intelligence community is much deeper than meets the eye. He believes that intelligence agencies spent a lot of time and energy infiltrating Chinese research programmes, including military programs, and they were trying to protect their assets as far as possible so did not want any investigations into that [Wuhan] laboratory.
Redfield believes that the lab leak occurred between mid-August and September 2019, when scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) became infected and then spread the virus around the city. He believes China’s leaders covered up the outbreak from mid-September, when their military took full control of WIV – and on the same day the lab took virus databases offline and ordered a new ventilation system.
Suspects of the October 2019 Military World Games, when thousands of athletes converged on Wuhan, played a significant role in spreading the disease worldwide. Redfield now calls for misconduct investigations into what he says was Fauci’s cabal of international scientists who branded backers of the lab leak idea as conspiracy theorists, despite evidence emerging that several privately held similar concerns.
These explosive claims have huge global implications, especially given the hostility faced by the handful of scientists and journalists who argued from the start of the pandemic that the outbreak of a new coronavirus in a city far from the habitat of infected bats, and home to a secretive Chinese laboratory specialising in bat viruses, meant a lab leak origin could not be discounted.
Redfield expects the Trump administration to declassify much of the US intelligence on Covid’s origins before leaving the CDC in 2021. He believes there is “not even one per cent chance” that Sars-CoV-2 – the virus that causes Covid-19 – crossed into humans naturally from animals, a process known as zoonotic spillover.
Redfield, a prominent public health leader and virologist, was a central figure in the pandemic from the start. He first heard about a new respiratory disease in Wuhan from CDC staff in China on New Year’s Eve 2019, and convened an immediate online meeting with key members of the National Security Council. During an initial flurry of conversations with George Gao, his public health counterpart in Beijing, he was surprised to be told to formally request sending in a US team to help tackle the unfolding public health disaster in Wuhan.
Redfield sat with Donald Trump in the White House after persuading the President to call Xi Jinping in a desperate – but rebuffed – bid to get his team of waiting CDC experts into the central Chinese city. He says the two diseases are very different, despite molecular similarities. Sars viruses struggle to infect humans, but those infected show clear symptoms, while Covid was immediately one of the most infectious viruses known to mankind and largely asymptomatic. Studies have shown that a significant proportion of people infected with the virus do not display symptoms or fall sick, especially younger people.
China’s George Gao, a Harvard and Oxford-trained virologist and immunologist with expertise on coronaviruses, initially told Redfield that the first cases had all come from Wuhan’s wet market, which had been shut down. Redfield suggested casting the net wider across the city to check for other cases. However, he later called him back and was quite distraught and clearly upset – he said, “Bob, we have hundreds and hundreds of cases and it’s nothing to do with the wet market.”
Gao officially confirmed the market was a spreader of the virus, not the source, in a statement in May 2020. Yet even today, those pushing the spillover theory still pump out claims pointing the finger at animals on sale there.
Redfield suspected a lab leak from the start, so during discussions with the White House task force he frequently clashed with Dr. Fauci, the hugely influential director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the world’s biggest biomedical research agency, for almost four decades. Yet Redfield assumed that both theories – lab leak vs zoonotic spillover – would be tested with robust and transparent debate until one was proved correct by weight of evidence in the standard scientific style.
Alongside Fauci, the other two core figures were Sir Jeremy Farrar, now the WHO’s chief scientist but who was then boss of the London-based Wellcome Trust (Europe’s biggest medical research charity), whose chair was Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, former director general of MI5, and Francis Collins, then director of NIH. Lord Vallance, then the UK government’s chief scientific adviser, also joined that initial key teleconference that determined their seemingly duplicitous approach.
Redfield, a devout Catholic who combines his religious faith with a profound belief in the power of science and was inspired by parents who worked as researchers at NIH, was dismayed to discover the real Covid conspiracy taking place at the highest echelons of the scientific community.
In March 2020, a teleconference led to the publication of a commentary in Nature Medicine, which five prominent scientists concluded they did not believe any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible. This article was cited by Dr. Fauci in the White House and singled out to Farrar during journalistic enquiries as “the most important research” on the pandemic origins. It has emerged that Farrar helped edit the commentary after the teleconference call, while the identified authors privately talked of pressure from higher ups to squash lab leak concerns.
Farrar himself highlighted ‘Wild West’ biosecurity in Wuhan to NIH director Francis Collins. A Fauci aide also talked about learning from a colleague how to’make emails disappear’ and sending’stuff to Tony’ on private email to avoid freedom of information requests.
Fauci told a House of Representatives inquiry last year that while he kept an open mind on the issue of Covid origins, evidence pointed toward the virus spilling over naturally. He claimed it was’molecularly impossible’ for US taxpayer-funded experiments in Wuhan to have produced the pandemic-causing virus but added that he did not think the concept of there being a lab leak is inherently a conspiracy theory.
Farrar, along with two other Wellcome Trust officials, was among the 27 scientists who signed a notorious letter in The Lancet, praising Chinese experts for ‘rapid, open, and transparent sharing of data’ and condemning ‘conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin’. It was later found to have been organized days after that teleconference call by Peter Daszak, a British zoologist whose US-based EcoHealth Alliance had channelled US taxpayer dollars to Wuhan Institute of Virology and who was closely involved with its bat virus research.
Redfield was left infuriated by this group’s actions, as there is absolutely no data that supports spillover and plenty of data that supports lab leak. His certainty comes from the failure of those backing the zoonotic spillover argument to find a species that transmitted the disease from bats to humans, despite an intensive search by Chinese authorities with testing of samples from at least 80,000 animals.
The discovery of the gain-of-function feature in bat viruses led to the discovery that WIV, EcoHealth Alliance, and Ralph Baric sought US defense agency funding to insert this feature into bat viruses in 2018, just one year before the virus emerged in Wuhan. However, their bid was rejected as too risky, and Shi Zhengli, China’s infamous ‘Batwoman’ expert, refused to answer last year when asked if she had pushed on with such experiments. Redfield believes that US virologists at government labs had detected signs of other significant genetic manipulations altering a bat virus to react differently with humans, including blocking the interferon response elements, which cause many infected people to not fall ill or show symptoms.
Redfield fears the pandemic did huge damage to trust in his beloved science and hopes Trump’s pressure on Beijing might convince China’s leader Xi to come clean on Covid’s origins. He believes the US shares culpability after funding gain-of-function research in Wuhan even after it was banned domestically. He disapproves of Joe Biden giving Fauci a pre-emptive pardon against any offences that might have been committed in his public roles from 2014, coincidentally, the same year the US ban on gain-of-function research came into force and also the start date for a significant National Institutes of Health grant to Wuhan. There is currently no evidence that Fauci committed any offenses during his time as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the NIH.
