Did US scientists try to suppress Covid-19 lab-leak theory? Ex-CDC chief claims so

The former head of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said that he was sidelined from all investigations and meetings as the scientists in the country tried to understand the origin of the Covid-19 virus. Dr Robert Redfield said at a US congressional committee hearing that since his views were not in line with those of other scientists probing the origin of the virus, such as Dr Anthony Fauci, he was sidelined. Dr Redfield suspected a lab leak and was one of the first to propose the theory.

Meanwhile, Dr Fauci has dismissed all allegations made by Dr Redfield as "completely untrue". Redfield told the House select subcommittee, set up by the new Republican majority in the US House of Representatives to understand the origins of the virus, it wasn't "scientifically plausible" to him that the virus could have natural origins.

Dr Redfield told the committee that during several calls with Fauci, WHO chief scientist Jeremy Farrar, and WHO director Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, he “expressed as a clinical virologist that I felt it was not scientifically plausible that this virus went from a bat to humans and became one of the most infectious viruses that we have in humans.”

He says after that, they started excluding him from the calls since they wanted a single narrative. "It was told to me that they wanted a single narrative and that I obviously had a different point of view," he said. "Science has debate and they squashed any debate."

Fauci told Politico that "no one excluded anyone".

"And the idea of saying that he was not wanted there because he had a different opinion … there were several people on the call who had the opinion that it might have been an engineered virus," said Dr Fauci.

Fauci served as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases from 1984 to 2022.

Dr Redfield went on to say that he also opposed the so-called gain of function research as such acts involve manipulating the virus to make it become more infectious in lab environments. He admitted that it was highly likely that US agencies funded such research at the Wuhan institute, the lab at the centre of the controversy.

(With inputs from agencies)

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