Dr. Robert Redfield, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said Thursday that avian influenza has the potential to become the "great pandemic," telling Newsmax that if the virus learns how to be transmitted human to human, "it will be catastrophic."
By comparison, Redfield said the COVID-19 pandemic, which killed more than 7 million people worldwide, was the "lesser pandemic."
Redfield joined Newsmax's "National Report" to again beat the drum against gain-of-function research, which teaches viruses "to be more infectious for humans."
"I've always said that the COVID pandemic was the lesser pandemic and that I'm concerned of the great pandemic, and I am continuing to be concerned about that. I think bird flu has the potential to become the great pandemic," Redfield said. "Right now it's isolated between birds and mammals. ... The virus hasn't learned how to go human to human, similar to what we talked about with COVID. Originally, COVID didn't know how to go human to human either. It was taught how to do that in the laboratory.
"I always remind people about the COVID virus; it's kind of interesting that this virus that my friends like Dr. [Anthony] Fauci said came from spillover from bats, that virus no longer can infect bats, right? It infects humans very efficiently," Redfield said.
Redfield was CDC director from 2018 to 2021 under then-President Donald Trump. He said he was "ostracized," ridiculed, called a racist, and received death threats for espousing the minority scientific opinion at the time that COVID came from the Wuhan Lab in China where it was "engineered."
"I don't believe it was leaked intentionally, but I do believe it was leaked from the lab where they were trying to teach this virus to be more infectious for humans," Redfield said.
"So I'm worried about bird flu. ... If, in fact, bird flu learns how to go human to human, it will be catastrophic. I don't agree with my scientific colleagues that are intentionally taking bird flu into the laboratory and trying to teach it how to infect humans. ... I think it's misguided that we're doing gain-of-function research with bird flu," Redfield said.
Redfield said he's not sure if gain-of-function research is happening in U.S. labs.
"Well, I know there were grants at U.S.-based labs to do it. Whether they're actually operational or not, I don't know, because last time I said that they were operational and some people criticized me," he said. "But there is not a moratorium on gain-of-function research right now. And there are laboratories that are looking at bird flu. ... I do think we should stop gain-of-function research, particularly with bird flu right now, but really in general. "
Further, Redfield said the U.S. needs to "get much more prepared" for another pandemic.
"I'm a big advocate that we need to invest much more heavily in antiviral drug development," he said. "I remind people that we had one of the most successful vaccine programs in the history of the world, with Operation Warp Speed. I was on the board and we developed a number of vaccines in record time, in eight months, and yet still 1.2 million Americans died."
Redfield joined Newsmax on the day the White House reportedly withdrew its nomination of Dave Weldon for CDC director, a job Redfield said is now "more complicated" given the loss of credibility in the aftermath of "non-thoughtful policies" during COVID.
"So my answer to bird flu ... is really not that we need to [develop] more vaccines, I think we need aggressive antiviral drug development so we have a variety of options to treat people if and when they get infected," Redfield said.
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