Dr. Robert Redfield, former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director and top virologist, had one of the highest levels of classified-information clearance among the members of President Donald Trump’s coronavirus task force.
He couldn’t reveal everything he knew to me back in June 2021 when I interviewed him, but it was clear even then he held deep suspicions based on what he knew that SARS-CoV-2 came from a lab.
His view was drowned out by Dr. Anthony Fauci’s unyielding dogmatic narrative that COVID must have come from nature.
More recently, Redfield told me the FBI was the agency best positioned to report what happened — and so it came as no surprise to me last week when FBI Director Chris Wray told Fox News that COVID most likely came from a lab incident.
Yet the White House still firmly supports the dangerous gain-of-function research that makes viruses more transmissible — which Fauci helped fund at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The White House also fails to acknowledge what the FBI knows, a serious oversight at this late date, especially as we consider how to prepare for the next pandemic, which may very well be artificially created.
Consider the facts.
Why is it important to know for certain whether COVID came from a lab?
Because, as Redfield says, it fuels worries that the next pandemic might come from a lab as well.
This is especially concerning in the case of H5N1 bird flu.
Bird flu continues to infect millions of birds, both domestic and wild, and has a very high mortality rate.
There is spillover to mammals but no sustained spread from human to human.
Gain-of-function research in ferrets Ron Fouchier and his colleagues in the Netherlands performed back in 2012 showed that H5N1 bird flu was still several mutations away (in nature) from being able to transmit easily human to human, and the virus has not shown a major shift in that direction since then.
Unfortunately, generating these exact mutations provided a road map that a rogue scientist could use to engineer the exact mutations we are trying to avoid and introduce a very dangerous virus into the human community.
In the meantime, we are not doing a good enough job trying to limit bird flu in the bird population, where millions of infections increases the chance of major mutations.
The Fouchier experiments — which engineered the virus until ferrets (which respond to flu similar to humans) were able to transmit it through the air — led to a moratorium on gain-of-function research for H5N1 that even Fauci, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases then-director and gain-of-function-research believer, endorsed.
Unfortunately, this moratorium was lifted in 2019, amid protest in the scientific community — with Fauci’s NIAID funding research.
Top avian influenza researcher David Swayne told me many years ago that hemagglutinins with high numbers (including H5) are not conducive — in nature — to human-to-human spread. Still, he believes in carefully monitoring the spread in birds and trying to control it.
Hemagglutinin is the protein on the surface of the flu virus that enables it to attach itself to cells.
H5N1 is highly lethal to chickens but is harbored relatively asymptomatically in ducks, which then transmit it widely, though not generally to humans.
Unfortunately, the same soothsayers who missed COVID now think they are in a position to predict the next great threat.
But the biggest future threat to us is not a specific virus, but the manipulations we do to it to supposedly protect ourselves by gauging its potential to harm us.
It is likely COVID came from a lab, and it’s also likely that without an immediate change of global policy the next pandemic will too.
Marc Siegel, MD, is a clinical professor of medicine and medical director of Doctor Radio at NYU Langone Health and a Fox News medical analyst.