The former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from 2018 to 2021, Dr. Robert Redfield, told the Daily Mail in a four-hour interview published Saturday that American and British intelligence agencies conducted a counterintelligence operation on the public to quash narratives that COVID-19 emerged from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China.
Redfield, who told the Mail he had seen most of the United States' intelligence on COVID-19 in 2021 before leaving his position, made his assessment about a coverup pointing to ties the former head of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr. Anthony Fauci, had to the intelligence community starting in "2004," the Mail reported.
The intelligence community "pulled a lot of the strings to protect their agents inside China's military-linked laboratories," Redfield said. "The role of the intelligence community is much deeper than meets the eye. It was so effective. I think it was not just the Americans — the British had to be involved, too.
"Intelligence agencies," he added, "spent a lot of time and energy infiltrating Chinese research programs, including military programs, and they were trying to protect their assets as far as possible so [they] did not want any investigations into that [Wuhan] laboratory.
"The more scrutiny of the laboratory, especially by the Chinese leadership, the higher the risk. I don't know all the answers, but the bottom line is that this does not smell right."
Redfield said he expects the Trump administration to declassify information pertaining to the outbreak.
"I suspect all the intelligence agencies will — like the CIA — have to reevaluate their analysis on COVID and will be unanimous in their conclusions. I think they'll all come out and say critical analysis of the intelligence data concludes it came from the lab."
Later in the interview, Redfield reaffirmed his past position there was "not even 1% chance" that COVID-19 was a spillover event from animals to humans.
"One final thing: How come COVID-19 can no longer infect bats when it's so efficient at infecting humans? This never happened with SARS and seems a pretty telling point to me."
Redfield speculated that scientists in Wuhan had been conducting gain-of-function research on COVID-19 to develop a universal carrier for vaccines that could be aerosolized and used in civilian and military applications.
"It would have been great to make a universal vaccine that could be used for every antigen you want," he said. "There was just one problem: The vector they used to develop it was not contained and caused the worst global pandemic we've seen in over 100 years."
Redfield concluded, pinning Fauci, who received a preemptive pardon from former President Joe Biden, as a modern-day J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb.
"Fauci must deal with the same issue as Oppenheimer: He used science that maybe he thought was for a greater good that ended up killing hundreds of thousands of people and will continue to kill millions more, because this virus is with us until the end of time."
Nick Koutsobinas ✉
Nick Koutsobinas, a Newsmax writer, has years of news reporting experience. A graduate from Missouri State University’s philosophy program, he focuses on exposing corruption and censorship.
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