Dr. Redfield On Rising: Gain-of-Function Research WILL Cause The 'NEXT GREAT PANDEMIC'

an international team of virus experts have said on Thursday that they actually found genetic data from a market in Wuhan China that they believe links the coronavirus with animals raccoon dogs that had been for sale there the New York Times reported on that adding evidence to the theory that kova 19 their Theory originated from Human Animal contact in a wet Market the genetic data was drawn from swabs taken in and around the huanan seafood wholesale Market starting in January of 2020. this was shortly after the Chinese authorities shut down the market due to suspicions that it was linked to the outbreak of the coronavirus joining us now to discuss is former CDC director Robert Redfield welcome doctor thank you thanks for having me it's our pleasure so first and foremost does this new information about uh the the swabs that have been taken that show evidence that these raccoon dogs had coveted the covid virus changed your estimation of what the origin of the pandemic was no I don't think it really adds anything I think it's important first they didn't show that the raccoon dogs were actually infected what they showed was they could have DNA from raccoon dogs on swabs that they also had the covet virus on so it's also not unusual for Animals you know to be infected as opposed to being the intermediate reservoir for example you may or may not know in the United States a substantial number of the white-tailed deer are infected with covid dogs can be infected with Copic cats can be infected with covid minks can be infected with copen so all they did was show that in the same swab they had nucleic acid from a from a raccoon dog and nucleic acid from um from covet so the dogs could have been infected they could not have been infected they could have just been in the same space where the virus was the other problem I have with all of this and I wish these authors you know rather than publishing the Atlantic Monthly they'd put their data out into a scientific peer-reviewed journal where it could be critically reviewed I do want to remind people that we have really strong evidence that this pandemic did not start in December January it actually started probably somewhere between August and September August September October so I'm still waiting for the authors and because they're good scientists they're Men of Integrity women of Integrity but the reality is they really should retract their proximal origin paper where they say that was the origin of the covet because they're basically three to four months out of date from when the pandemic really started you know Dr Redfield you were one of a a prominent government Health advisors who came out and and said you know what you thought about the possible lab origin lab leak origins of kovid a view that was really highly stigmatized I think for a long period of time particularly in the media where where political figures and other health officials who really just raised the possibility of it um you know we're kind of we're we're likened to a it was a conspiracy theory that sort of thing now that the the energy department has made its conclusion the FBI as well that they're expressing you know low confidence admittedly but that it a lab origin being more likely I'm seeing people discussing it again in the media what do you make of this period of time where you were really not even allowed to to express that view in polite Society well I think the whole approach particularly by the leadership of NIH I've said this before was antithetical to science you know I stand by my testimony that I did recently uh and I know Dr fauci Tony has some disagreement but he's incorrect and I did speak with him in January and Jeremy Ferrar about how important I thought it was at NIH lead a scientific investigation into the two hypotheses spillover in lab league and do it aggressively uh so that we can use science to try to understand what what the origins of this virus was and instead rather than lead an open transparent scientific debate where both sides were represented very rapidly within the first week of February they went to basically totally support the spillover hypothesis and you've seen that even with the paper the proximal origin even with the consensus on their phone call even with a letter in Lancet that referred to people like me as conspirators because I had a different point of view I will say I expressed my point of view on the White House task force in in January uh February of of 2020 so people knew that I was of the view as the head of CDC that it was a reasonable hypothesis that this came from a laboratory and both oath hypothesis should be pursued it was very quick though that the NIH uh took a very aggressive stance as did many of the scientists that the only acceptable hypothesis was spillover and unfortunately the media went in I mean the article that you started out it's not even a scientific article it's a comment in in in Atlanta monthly in the New York Times and yet it becomes major news as if there's a a strong bias in my view towards trying to promote a spillover hypothesis rather than having what I consider a honest scientific debate where I've always said if people prove that I'm wrong I thank them because then I learned something if you prove to me that I'm right I'm not as thankful because you didn't teach me anything this should this should be a scientific debate and it hasn't been it's been a geopolitical decision for a single narrative which is unfortunate and as I said it's antithetical to science and Dr Redfield do you think that's because I think what we're all wondering is do figures like Dr fauci who have been you know very Chief Advocates of a certain kind of scientific research that many people are reasonably worried could have contributed to a lab leak type incident with the grant funding by the US government that was done and that that research was conducted in Wuhan China is is there a fear that some of the government Health scientists and and their and their and their surrogates um how they have incentive to Tamp down lab leak speculation because that impugnes their funding priorities and their their view of what kind of science should be done yeah first I want to be very clear because uh Tony fashion and I have been colleagues and friends for over 40 years I do believe that fauci and Collins are work uh are working in what they believe is in the best interest of science I happen to totally disagree with them they are strong Advocates of gain a function research I'm a strong advocate for a moratorium on gain a function research because I do believe it's very probable that this pandemic was a direct consequence of science I do think you're right that there's a strong interest in protecting their view protecting science that is protecting gain of function research and thereby trying to shift the debate but this obviously didn't come from the laboratory this obviously came from nature and that's really the push you know secondarily you know you know and I don't blame the Chinese lab per se you know the reality is the U.S government funded this work nih-funded it usaid funded it the state department funded and the dod funded it so the United States funded the research and the scientific Community largely in America and Europe fostered the gain of function research which was the basis for which this virus came Tony's right that prior to getting a function research the only way new pathogens came in to the human species was spillover but now in the presence of gain a function research where you can take a pathogen into a laboratory and change it then no longer does the species barrier really Define uh the event in humans it can actually come and I do believe the next pandemic and we're going to have another pandemic and I think it's going to be the great pandemic I consider coven a minor pandemic the great pandemic is going to come and normally it would come from spillover it's going to be bird flu that learns how to transmit to humans and then go human to human but I think the species barriers are very real but it's much more probable that it will happen because it gain of function research in a laboratory and then escape and then we're going to have a pandemic with flu which will be much more brutal to the world than covet was um doctor I so appreciate you saying that you appreciate being told you know that when you're wrong because then you learn something I'm wondering if um you know you could share anything that um you think you were wrong about at the beginning of the pandemic now that you're being quite Vindicated on some of the larger questions well that was wrong on several things I didn't make this decision the broader scientific Community College and others did to call this you know sars-like this virus is not SARS like SARS basically came from a bad to an intermediate host to humans but it never learned how to go efficiently human to Human MERS never learned to go efficiently to human human this virus immediately was one of the most infectious fires so what's the first mistake we made and I was part of it my colleague my counterpart George gal who was the head of CDC in China basically guaranteed me that this virus didn't go human to Human right even though I was skeptical when I saw his first uh 27 cases because three of them were in clusters we did come to the conclusion that this virus was also sars-like in that it only caused disease symptomatically so I think the first big mistake I made was I was looking for symptomatic infections and so as a consequence we told the Public Health Community look for sick people that had exposure to China and let's test them for the virus Debbie Burks and I by the middle end of February said we got that wrong this virus largely is asymptomatic and so that changes the entire Public Health response because now you can't look for sick people you've got to figure out another way to diagnose the silent epidemic and that was expanded testing so I'd say the first mistake that I made and many came along with me was assuming that this virus caused symptomatic infection and in fact it didn't and it really formed the basis of our original Public Health response you remember when people coming back at airports we would screen everybody at the airport and we'd ask them if they were sick and if they were sick we would take them aside and evaluate them and if they weren't sick we'd let them right go through we now know that probably three quarters of people to get covered don't get sick if they're younger than say the age of 50 big mistake there were also problems with early testing you know that the CDC was involved with you've said we're going to have another pandemic God forbid worse than covert that sounds horrible do you think given the early testing errors that happened with covet would the CDC be be better able to gear up in the event of another pandemic so that we don't have the the failures with the tests and things of that nature yeah thanks for bringing it up because this is another area where the media never got it quite right okay a cdc's job was to develop new tests for the Public Health Community of our nation for the Public Health Labs and I actually think we should have gotten an award because we developed a test within 10 days of knowing the sequence of this virus and that's how we were able to diagnose the first cases I think on January 21st um that test was never flawed that test never failed that test was never not available to any health department in the United States the only problem is you had to send the blood to CDC now people at CDC decided after the health departments were kind of complaining that they were tired of sending all the blood to CDC that wouldn't it be nice if we gave them the reagents so they could do their own test and CDC made the decision then to manufacture the reagents uh the second thing they decided since they were sending the test away from the mothership they wanted to be very sure that they wouldn't get false positives so this test was based on what we call two prime repairs they decided to add a third prime repair well that third primer pair wasn't vetted to the degree it should have been and so when they sent the test out that Thursday uh and to validate it was never used by the health departments because they had to prove that it worked my phone started ringing the next day that the test wasn't validating they were getting low level false positives and what we learned was that the third primer pair was um the FDA would argue was contaminated I argued it may have been a design flaw we know now it was a design flaw I can't rule out that it wasn't also contaminated we then removed the third prime repair and went back to the original test and it's worked ever since and continues to this day the real problem with testing and this is really important for the next pandemic and why does South Korea do so well and we do so poorly South Korea developed private Public Partnerships with the diagnostic companies when they had their MERS outbreak all right and so they were in place we have a CDC that makes lab tests for the 100 or so Public Health Labs but we don't have a CDC to make lab tests for every hospital in the country or for clinical medicine that's the job of the private sector and so what happened was there was no private sector and Barta never got engaged to bring the private sector in the private sector didn't get engaged because when MERS when SARS came they built a test and then SARS went away when MERS came they built a test and MERS went away so everyone's saying this is SARS like the private sector stayed on the sideline the other major flaw which was I got Steve hunt to change the FDA had decided that they didn't want any laboratory developed tests they want to regulate laboratory developed tests I ran laboratory is my career and I developed a lot of laboratory tests that I used to help die and treat my patients so we assumed that the molecular Labs at Harbor Mass general you know in in Seattle San Francisco they would all chime in because we published our primer pairs we published the method we didn't patent it we figured all the big you know diagnostic labs in the hospitals would go ahead and start providing testing for people but that didn't happen because the FDA made it very clear that they were going to come down hard on anybody that used a lab develop test so that was another flaw I want to get you before we run out of time with you to just respond to a recent appearance by Dr fauci on news Nations Cuomo with with news Nation Tacoma he responded to your testimony concerning the very early days of the pandemic let's take a quick look well you know it's really sad Chris that he's wrong on every single account but you don't need to take my word for it you take the word for the people he's saying that the phone call to discuss the possibility that this might have been engineered that I was in charge of the phone call and I deliberately excluded him because his his ideas differed from what he interpreted with mine well first of all he had no idea what my ideas were because they kept a completely open mind secondly I was not responsible I didn't include or exclude anybody from the call because the people that were responsible for setting up the call were Jeremy Farah from the Welcome trust in the UK Eddie Holmes from from Australia and a bunch of other very competent evolutionary virologists so for him to say and it's sad that he's so wrong and and he's publicly saying that that I excluded him now the other thing that's important he's saying that I excluded him because his idea was different from my idea and his idea was that it came from a lab well half the people on the call felt it might be from a lab so Dr Redfield what do you make of that response from Dr fauci well first I stand by my testimony I talked to Tony in January as I said before and Jerry mcferrar independently about the importance for us to have a scientific investigation into the two hypotheses and to have it rigorous transparent investigation into the to the two hypotheses and I made it clear you know that I as a virologist Tony's an immunologist as a virologist I favored a lab leak for a variety of different reasons and um I didn't say that Tony deliberately excluded me I said I was not included in the call now I can guarantee you ifachi was very involved in who was on that call and Jeremy Ferrar was working very closely with him as they did for the Lancet ladder as they did for the paper the proximal origin of AIDS so there's no question and the other thing I'll just say within three or four days if he had so many people that believed what I believed as a hypothesis that were so engaged in hypothesis within three or four days they all changed and they did a consensus report that the this laboratory leak was not not in the cards it couldn't have happened it had to be a spillover event so I disagree with Tony and sad he didn't provide the scientific leadership that he should have provided as the head of niid to have this transparent investigation of both hypotheses he should have put together teams to go after both hypotheses and it should have been open transparent rigorous scientific debate it didn't happen instead there was a very concerted effort uh to come to a single narrative now I'm not going to tell you who on the call told me that you know that how they went to a single narrative and they're not going to say who said that you know one of the reasons certain people weren't included like me is they were convinced that I wouldn't agree to a single narrative but the fact is they came out with a single narrative in three days so you're saying that the reason because it seemed like what Dr fascia was saying was that you don't know is mensuria you don't know what he really believed or what how he was leaning but you're saying that you had a conversation with somebody else who was a participant on the call who told you that the reason that you were in fact excluded excluded and the reason was because you were inclined to believe and another member another member said they wanted a single consensus and I was in there but I know what Tony felt because we argued it out in the um White House task force and you can read vice president Pence's book even says fauci guaranteed him that it didn't come from a lab it came from Sparrow but Redfield felt it came from Spiro from a lab it was all discussed within the White House task force it just wasn't discussed publicly what what was fauci saying to you well how was he pushing back against you as you were actually still over he says absolutely go back and watch all his you know one thing Tony has that I don't have in those days he has a lot of media time and you can go back and go back and play what he said okay go back and play what he said I think he said interested I think people are interested Dr bedfield and and because you you obviously are very knowledgeable about this and people are interested in in kind of what his off-camera response might have been to someone like yourself who is confronting him with direct factual uh direct factual basis for why you think the last Origins yeah read vice president Pence's book and he says it very clearly clearly that I said that it came from the lab Tony guaranteed him that it was a spillover event Dr Redfield I think a lot of people might say well okay we don't know exactly for sure which of these two hypotheses it is policy maybe policy changes should happen to guard against both of them perhaps you know if we if there were we there's only maybe so much we can do about wet Mart open wet markets in in China but if we had them in the US we would close them uh we would also maybe renew the moratorium on gain of function research which expired in 2018 my understanding is some exceptions were granted anyway under that moratorium um Dr fauci was was deposed on this issue and and gave some inclination that he might have personally signed off on some exceptions but now that moratorium no longer exists do you think we should re-implement a moratorium on This research like today yeah I mean the reason that I've taken the position that I've taken you know I just prefer to stay out of the public eye and been there done that but I took this position because I feel very strongly that we need to have a moratorium of gain a functional research I told you that the great pandemic is coming I think it's going to come not from spillover it's going to become from gain a function research or intentional bioterrorism right it's going to be a bird flu virus that is manipulated to be able to transmit human to human very similar to what we saw with the cobit you know in 2014 that laboratory published that they finally learned how to take their covet virus and have it bind to the H2 receptor and humanize mice and therefore it could go human to Human I mean they did the experiments they published them in 2014 and and now we see that there's a covet virus which is I think has a number of signature sequences in it that aren't normal the fear and cleavage site the fact that they use the nucleotide triplet for arginine that humans use not batch use the fact that covet right now can barely infect bats but it can affect humans I should tell you that there's a lot of evidence that this virus was manipulated to be able to be highly transmissible among humans I think it was done probably as part of a biodefense program that largely was trying to make a vaccine Vector that would be used for good purposes but unfortunately that virus escaped and it was highly transmissible for you humans and you saw by the time it escaped which was probably somewhere in the September time frame remember in September that laboratory did three things they changed the management from the military the civilian to military they deleted all the sequences of the viruses and they put a contract in for a new ventilation system at about the same time they began to see some illness in the area so I think that's when the epidemic started and I do think the gain of function research moratorium is something should happen it shouldn't be decided just by scientists I happen to be a scientist but we shouldn't decide this ourselves there should be a broader debate of society whether This research needs to be done or not Tony will argue it needs to be done Collins will argue it needs to be done I think that debate should happen and if the answer for society is we need to do the research because the potential good is greater than any harm then we should figure out how do we do it in a safe responsible and effective way but right now this research is being done in the University Laboratories all over the world and again I'll go on record you know don't like to say it my parents were scientists it hurts me to say this but I do believe that the most likely answer when we get to the truth is that this pandemic was caused by science not by a natural spillover event Dr Redfield thank you so much for joining us today we really appreciate it all right thanks for having me God bless bye-bye more Rising right after this [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: The Hill

Views: 123,502

Keywords: Rising, Progressive, Progressive Politics, Democrats, Democratic Party, Republicans, GOP, Republican Party, Covid, Coronavirus, Fauci, Robert Redfield, Biden, Trump, Covid-19, Science, Vaccine, MSM, Mainstream Media, Lab Leak, Gain of Function

Id: 3N676CD1rlw

Length: 24min 46sec (1486 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 20 2023