FAUCI’S LID ON ‘LEAK’

CDC big: Stifled me

Former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Robert Redfield told lawmakers Wednesday that Dr. Anthony Fauci “sidelined” him from internal debates about the origin of COVID-19 at the start of the pandemic, saying the former White House chief medical adviser did not appreciate Redfield’s support for the so-called “lab leak theory.”

“This was a prior decision that there’s one point of view that we’re going to put out there, and anyone who doesn’t agree with it is going to be sidelined,” Redfield said at a hearing of the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic. “And as I say, I was only the CDC director, and I was sidelined.”

Redfield, 71, told Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) that his support for the theory that the coronavirus accidentally emerged from a laboratory in Wuhan, China — rather than jumping from animals to humans — likely prompted his exclusion from high-level discussions of the outbreak.

“I think I made it very clear in January [2020] to all of them why we had to aggressively pursue this,” he said. “And I let them know as a virologist that I didn’t see that this was anything like SARS or MERS. . . . And they knew that was how I was thinking.”

Redfield added that he was not aware that Fauci and then-National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins convened a conference call on Feb. 1, 2020, to discuss the worldwide outbreak until internal emails were published by The Washington Post and Buzzfeed News in June 2021.

“I didn’t know there was a Feb. 1 conference call until the Freedom of Information came out with the emails, and I was quite upset, as the CDC director, that I was excluded from those discussions,” he said.

“Why would they do this?” Comer asked.

“Because I had a different point of view,” Redfield responded. “And I was told that they had made a decision that they would keep this confidential until they came up with a single narrative — which I will argue is antithetical to science.”

He added: “Science never selects a single narrative. We foster debate. And we’re confident that with debate, science will get to the truth.”