Former CDC Director Robert Redfield On Inside Battles With Anthony Fauci, And Why Classified Information Will Point to a Lab Accident in Wuhan

ROBERT REDFIELD: DICHRON INTERVIEW

12 minute read

Shortly after the pandemic started in early 2020, many people began to ask, “Where is the CDC? Why are they not leading on this?” Criticisms of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have persisted throughout the pandemic, leading to a call to reorganize the agency by the current director, Dr. Rochelle Walensky.

But when the pandemic first began, the person in charge was Dr. Robert Redfield, a former Army physician and professor at the University of Maryland. Before running the CDC, Redfield had retired from the military after founding the Department of Retroviral Research within the U.S. Military’s HIV Research Program. He then moved on to co-found the University of Maryland’s Institute of Human Virology and served as the Chief of Infectious Diseases at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.

Redfield is now the senior public health advisor to the state of Maryland and Governor Larry Hogan, and he recently helped start PDTi, a company working to distribute vaccines to resource-poor countries.

In a wide-ranging interview, Redfield explained what he saw while running the CDC during the early days of the pandemic, his attempts to get a CDC team into China, and his struggles with the NIH’s Anthony Fauci, who cut him out of meetings when Redfield said the government needed to investigate whether the pandemic started from a lab accident in Wuhan, China.

“Tony and I are friends, but we don't agree on this at all,” Redfield told me. “The potential for conspiracy is really on the other side. The conspiracy is Collins, Fauci, and the established scientific community that has acted in an antithetical way to science.”

Speaking with me from his home in Baltimore, Redfield said that evidence in favor of a lab accident in China continues to accumulate and he expects more classified information to become public. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

THACKER: I read a piece in Vanity Fair where you said that you were not being invited to meetings to discuss how the pandemic happened. This is a classic move in bureaucracy, cut people out of meetings so they can’t have a say.

You were in charge of the CDC, but you were also dealing with Anthony Fauci, who’s been in government service for over four decades—the guy is a master strategist at maneuvering inside the government. He’s like what people once said about Hoover—Presidents come and go, but Fauci is always around.

There was really no way you were going to get your way with this guy.

REDFIELD: The potential for conspiracy is really on the other side. The conspiracy is Collins, Fauci, and the established scientific community that has acted in an antithetical way to science. When the pandemic was first recognized by us—New Year’s Eve 2019—my team and China said there were 27 cases and it wasn't flu. We expected to see a pandemic flu emerge out of China, possibly another coronavirus, although SARS and MERS weren't really great threats because they never really learned how to transmit effectively human to human.

The real threat is bird flu. And we had a huge program proactively monitoring for bird flu.

I had my first sit report [situation report] on the new unspecified pneumonia on January 1st and briefed the National Security Council very shortly thereafter, in the first week of January. I was in contact with my Chinese counterpart George Gao at the Chinese CDC quite frequently. George made some very aggressive assessments: no evidence of human-to-human transmission, no hospital transmission, this virus caused symptomatic illness, and came from a wet market.

I asked George what his case study definition was, and this was probably January 2nd. He said it was unspecified pneumonia and it wasn't flu, from people who came from a wet market. I said, “Come on, we’ve both been in this business a long time and if that’s your definition then the only people involved came from the wet market because that’s your case definition.”

THACKER: Right. So they were only looking at people at the wet market, so of course they weren’t finding anyone outside the wet market. This is called the “streetlight effect” where you look for something where it’s easy to find.

REDFIELD: He defended it a little, and I said, “People made the same mistakes with the AIDS epidemic when they said you were either gay or a drug addict.” My program at Walter Reed, I tested women or men based on certain clinical symptoms, independent of their sexual history. And I found a third of my cases were women. But if you didn't ever look at women, you never had any women.

So George then started to evaluate people with unspecified pneumonia that had nothing to do with the wet market. My wife overheard the call about three days later—I thought he was in tears—and he said, “Bob, the epidemic is out of control with cases everywhere and it has nothing to do with the wet market.”

The wet market was an orchestrated attempt to position this pandemic to be like SARS or MERS. A big mistake. When you call it SARS-like that triggers a public health playbook.

I always remind people that SARS came in 2002/2003 from an animal and got into humans in China, and less than a thousand people were infected. It never learned how to go human to human.

This is part of the problem we have with the private sector, because the private sector started to make diagnostics available for vaccines, and basically within 18 months there was no more SARS.

Same thing happened with MERS in 2012, 2013 where it never learned how to get into humans very well.

COVID 19 was very different. And this was when Fauci and I kind of got into it in the second or third week in January. I'm a virologist and Tony is an immunologist. I told Tony that I'm very concerned that he was championing this theory that it came from animals, but there is another theory: that it came from a laboratory.

Tony and I had gotten into this back around 2012, when scientists had made some laboratory discoveries to convert bird flu so that it could be efficiently transmitted by air.

THACKER: These were the gain-of-function research studies by Ron Fouchier at Erasmus Medical Center in the Netherlands, and Yoshihiro Kawaoka at the University of Wisconsin. That really scared some people about what could happen if a virus was made more dangerous and then escaped.

REDFIELD: That's when Fauci became a champion of gain of function research. I thought society should debate whether this research needed to be done, and if it needed to be done, where could it be done in a safe and responsible way.

THACKER: This wasn't just you. Marc Lipsitch at Harvard started speaking up around that time and helped start the Cambridge Working Group to examine this type of gain of function research for biosafety.

REDFIELD: Marc did, and so did others. I argued against the publication of that study explaining how to make influenza more dangerous. I came from 23 years in the military, obviously significant security background. I felt that it was a mistake for us to publish the formula on how to make bird flu pandemic for humans.

THACKER: But when that happened, didn’t they first have some kind of a closed-door session or something along those lines?

REDFIELD: The scientific groups argued it out, but I vocalized that this should not be published. But anyhow, we lost. Tony said that this has to do with science and no one should stand in the way of science.

And this later resulted in a 2015 paper involving the Wuhan lab with manipulating coronaviruses.

I think this is where Tony may have overplayed his hand when he was so aggressive with Congress, saying that he was never involved in funding gain of function research. There's too much evidence that's just not true.

THACKER: When I was a Senate Investigator, I had to write letters to lawyers counseling them about the rules on providing false and or misleading information to Congress. I've been over this process several times with Senate legal counsel before sending these letters.

When Fauci testified before Congress and denied funding gain of function research, because he has his own definition of gain of function, I immediately thought, “This guy just lied before Congress.”

REDFIELD: Yes, he clearly misled Congress. And then he went over the top taking on Rand Paul and others in an offensive way for a public servant. Tony and I are friends, but we don't agree on this at all.

To go back, we had the COVID sequence on the 10th of January and I had several calls with Tony in the next few days, as we were trying to figure the pandemic out. By the way, it was never the White House blocking us at CDC from publicly addressing the pandemic. It was HHS. It was HHS’s decision to put Fauci out in the public.

I called Tony and said that we need to put together a group and pursue two hypotheses about how this pandemic began: the natural evolution that you're promoting and my concern about laboratory problems. And we need to approach this scientifically.

And I called Jeremy Farrar from the Wellcome Trust because I was trying to get the CDC into China with a team, and I had a team ready to go. George Gao had asked for my help but he couldn't approve it. He said I had to write a letter to the Chinese CDC expressing my interest to help, but that letter was never responded to.

I called Tedros at the WHO and told him how important it was to address these two possibilities. And I argued that it could be a lab virus and we need to anticipate that this virus might have aggressive evolution. We shouldn't be expecting that this is going to be like SARS and just disappear.

THACKER: Why would it change your response if you knew it had come from a lab?

REDFIELD: Go back to SARS and MERS. Those viruses, as we sit here today, still don't know how to go human to human. A human gets infected, but rarely does it infect others.

This virus, I knew right away … I had other information over the next couple of weeks that wasn't public. Now, a lot of it has been declassified. The COVID epidemic obviously didn't start in December; it actually started way back in August, or maybe September in Wuhan.

A lot of these people were rused to set up this idea that this came from nature, protecting the reality that it more likely came from the lab. Who wanted to protect that? One of them … I got angry at Francis Collins because he should have led on this, but then he called people who think like me “conspirators.” I’m not a conspirator, I'm a scientist. I have a scientific hypothesis that I want to examine; If you have a scientific hypothesis, then you should want yours examined.

I talked to Farrar and talked to Tedros, talked to Fauci on multiple occasions about the importance of putting our resources into finding this out scientifically.

I didn't know what was going on behind the scenes until after the freedom of information documents came out. Tony set up meetings and excluded me. When I’ve talked to some of the insiders to try to understand how and why that happened, I was told that the Collins and Fauci were clear that they wanted one narrative.

Everyone had to agree to the narrative.

THACKER: When I first started thinking about this, I thought, “This is classic bureaucracy.” When you’re trying to control a situation, you figure out what someone's going to say and then you bring in just the people who are going to say what you want to hear. This might sound nefarious, but it's classic bureaucratic maneuvering. You got outmaneuvered.  

REDFIELD: Yeah, he excluded me. More than that, then they tried to discredit us.

THACKER: When did you realize the discrediting was happening? Because the Lancet piece that Peter Daszak orchestrated came out in like early 2020. Did you notice that when it came out or did you just kind of dismiss?

REDFIELD: I suspected it was set up by Jeremy Farrar. But Jeremy was, I'm sure, acting under orders from somebody. The Lancet piece was orchestrated by Jeremy Farrar—I think under direction of Fauci and Collins, trying to nip any attempt to have an honest investigation of the pandemic’s origin.

Collins, in earnest, believes that he was protecting science. Because if there was any implication that science was involved, it would have a negative impact on science. I argued it was the antithesis, that they were harming science. The way to protect science is approach this scientifically.

Tony had over a year looking for an intermediate host and still hadn’t found one.

You have a virus that is one of the most infectious viruses in the history of humanity, and yet that virus no longer can infect the bat? You tell me that's normal. That’s normal? No, this is highly abnormal.

I am convinced that consciously or subconsciously—some of both—they're trying to protect science. Fauci knows that he’s funded this research. He also knows that he misled Congress. They’re in protection mode.

The problem is, more and more people have started looking into this. And more of the information got declassified. When I reviewed the classified documents we had early on about the furin cleavage site, I said, “This isn’t natural.” The DNA that codes for the amino acid isn’t from bats, they’re human.

Arginine has different triplets that can code for it. And the triplet in the furin cleavage site is the one most commonly found in humans, not bats. This thing was manipulated, orchestrated. That cleavage site was created.

THACKER: Can you explain what a furin cleavage site is?

REDFIELD: The furin cleavage site, it cleaves a protein. Without that, the binding site on the virus receptor doesn’t fit into the human receptor. That’s what allows the virus to enter into human cells. But this virus cannot enter a bat cell.

I assume Tony knew all this stuff. It was classified then, it’s unclassified now. But we knew that EcoHealth Alliance put this in a research grant to DARPA to do what this virus has.

THACKER: You knew back in January 2020 that this came from a lab?

REDFIELD: That was my hypothesis at the time.

Tony’s view was grounded in his scientific view, that it came from nature because that's what happened with other outbreaks. And if there was never gain of function research, the only way pathogens got into humans was from animals. But once gain of function was on the table, there was a second path.

Looking at this as a virologist, this virus was not acting like others. It had an accelerated capacity to transmit among humans. My view was it wasn't biologically plausible that this happened because some animal infected a human and it immediately was one of the most infectious viruses that we have ever seen.

And then we see the Wuhan lab: they had published papers in 2015. Tony refused to seriously consider this. And then you see The Lancet published that letter in early 2020 calling people “conspiracy theorists.” There was nothing scientific about that letter. It was just an attempt to intimidate people.

THACKER: Did you realize what was happening at that time?

REDFIELD: I knew it was orchestrated. Fauci and Collins had used their political power within the scientific community to set the narrative. And Jeremy Farrar, if you will, was sort of the front person.

THACKER: How were you dealing with this internally? This is all the way back at the start of the pandemic in early 2020.

REDFIELD: I expressed my point of view in the White House task force. Everyone heard my opinion, and they heard it repetitively. [Laughs] Maybe more than they wanted to. The Vice President pushed Fauci, and Fauci guaranteed him that this came from nature.

That's what made me mad. You don't guarantee science. You have a hypothesis, and try to prove your hypothesis.

What Collins and Fauci did was not science. It was a political decision. I don't know their motivation. I don’t believe it was evil. I think Collins really believed he had to do this to protect scientific harmony in the world, whatever that really means. And I think Fauci … I think he knew at the beginning there was a smoking gun that led back to his own institute, and this might get more attention.

THACKER: I've spoken to people who told me that Fauci must have known very quickly, “Hey, I have these grants with money going to Wuhan where this thing started. Let's not have Congress come asking a bunch of questions and people getting curious.”

And then this email was just released showing that the NIH was discussing in January 2020, the month the pandemic kicked off, that Fauci’s NIAID had been funding Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance for coronavirus research in Wuhan. And they were discussing also the 2015 paper in Nature where they manipulated coronaviruses to infect human cells.

REDFIELD: Yeah, I think Tony tried to kill it. It’s unfortunate what's going on in our country that anybody who disagrees with the political lead is then pushed as an extremist. Or a conspirator.

I'm a scientist. You hand me the most infectious or maybe second most infectious virus that I've ever seen in humans, and there’s a published paper from seven years ago where a scientist in a lab, in the same city this virus started, had figured out how to make bat coronaviruses infect human tissues.

None of the bat coronaviruses in this group have furin cleavage sites to enter human cells, and this one has a furin cleavage site. And the arginine sequence of this cleavage site isn’t from the bat—it’s a human one. You have to at least ask the question whether this was contrived.

I don't believe there was any intent to harm people. The whole thing is scientific arrogance. There was an arrogance that they could contain this, that it wouldn't escape. I worked with the Chinese CDC for many years while in the military and while at the University of Maryland. And viruses get out of labs. That's just the nature of the beast.

I'm very disappointed in the NIH leadership. I hope that whoever takes over the NIH will provide that leadership rather than calling things a conspiracy or trying to orchestrate a narrative.

And you have to question why someone flips his position within 72 hours and then gets a huge grant later.

THACKER: You’re talking about Kristian Andersen and the emails that came out about his paper early on? They were first arguing that it came from a lab, but after some private phone conversations with Fauci and Farrar, they reversed their decision and called a lab accident a “conspiracy.”

REDFIELD: Andersen and another author flipped their position. I don't think they flipped their position without someone influencing them. I don't think it's because someone made an unbelievably intelligent scientific argument that then they realized how flawed they were. I think they flipped because they realized it was in their personal interest.

THACKER: Back in early 2021, I started looking to see how often the idea of a lab accident was dismissed a “conspiracy theory” and you would see it all the time, in the Washington Post, Nature magazine, Science magazine, New York Times science section—all of the scicomm community that doesn't do real journalism, but tells you how awesome science is.

The only media outlet that's gone back and corrected that is The Washington Post, which corrected a story calling a lab accident a conspiracy.

Why was everyone, all in chorus, calling it a conspiracy? Or anti-Asian hate?

REDFIELD: I don't know. I do think that Fauci and Collins were behind a lot of it. I had a book that I was going to put out, but now I’m going to wait. I'm still of the point of view that the Chinese are going to fully cooperate and help us write the real story. But it won't happen until this leader is no longer the head of the military or the head of the party.

There’s a good chance there'll be a new leader in China who will see the advantage of cleaning this up a little.

I was threatened, my life was threatened. I have letters I got from prominent scientists, that previously gave me awards, telling me that the best thing I could do for the world was to shoot myself because of what I said.

I was accused by the Baltimore Sun, I think three days in a row, for being anti-Asian. My governor came to my aid—he has an Asian wife and Asian children and he said, “Redfield is not anti-Asian, he is just telling you the hypothesis that he supports.”

THACKER: You went on CNN in early 2021 and spoke to Sanjay Gupta, and said you thought that it came from a lab when you looked at the evidence. I had no clue who you were, but I saw that you were a virologist, you had been running the CDC, and you obviously had access to classified information, that neither I nor anyone else in the media could see.

Immediately, Laura Helmuth at Scientific American tweets out that you shared a conspiracy theory on CNN. She then tried to rally the scicomm media against you, and Scientific American did a hit piece questioning your scientific expertise.

It was the opposite of journalistic curiosity, just “Let’s discredit this guy.”

REDFIELD: That’s how it works. I think that Tony has a great deal of influence at Scientific American.

THACKER: What was it like dealing with this?

REDFIELD: It bothers my children and my wife. But I ignore it. I just tell people what I believe to be the truth. I’ve explained my hypothesis and I think science is going to prevail. Since I first suspected it came from a lab in January 2020, that hypothesis is gaining ground.

I also think the Global Virome Project is problematic. Tony spoke at the Cosmos Club and got wined and dined, to help support that research. Some of this was in Vanity Fair, but not all of it has been reported. Money didn't go to the Global Virome Project just by accident. There was a lot of lobbying that went on.

THACKER: What do you think of Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance? They are basically running the Global Virome Project.

REDFIELD: I don’t know completely. I wouldn’t be funding them. They've got a lot of fingerprints on this pandemic. Some people argue that giving money to them was a way to get around the moratorium on gain of function research. And this was their strategy.

THACKER: Well, Fauci testified that this money wasn’t going to Wuhan, despite all the evidence to the contrary. But when you lie or mislead Congress, that's written up as a referral that goes over the Department of Justice. But Fauci is a direct advisor to the President …

REDFIELD: Yeah. Nothing's going to happen as long as the Biden administration is here. It would just be better for Tony to start leading a truly objective scientific investigation. So we can get some fairness. My advice for him is to take a step back and admit that he was biased.

I don’t think the WHO committee is a fair committee, but it's better than dismissing a lab accident as conspiracy like they did before. I think there's more to be discovered. And I think by 2024, a lot of this will be out there.

I said that I had a book proposal out, but what killed it with the big publishers was that I expressed what they thought was highly inappropriate—I suggested this virus came from a lab in China. And they weren't going to be part of publishing someone who had that point of view.

You have to just look at the evidence. Prior to 2012 or 2014, Tony is right. The only way new pathogens came into humans was from nature. But since that time, we’ve had people playing in the lab to create new pathogens. So now, new pathogens can come from nature or they can come from the laboratory.

So let’s just lay out the evidence. Let’s not cook the books on the debate, and this is what they seem to have done.