Former CDC Director Breaks Silence on Fauci

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**Georgia Howe** (1:03)
Five years on from the COVID pandemic, shocking details continue to come to light about the degree to which the American people were misled and information was suppressed.

**Robert Redfield** (1:13)
Once we knew that this was engineered to infect humans, we should have known we were in a race.

**John Bickley** (1:19)
In today's episode, we sit down with former CDC Director, Dr. Robert Redfield, to discuss his firsthand experience working with Dr. Fauci during the peak of the hysteria. Dr. Redfield shares why he believed from the start that the virus came from a lab, but that information was covered up. I'm Daily Wire, Executive Editor John Bickley with Georgia Howe. This is a weekend edition of Morning Wire.
Joining us now is Dr. Robert Redfield, former Director of the CDC. Dr. Redfield, thanks for coming on.

**Robert Redfield** (1:47)
Thank you very much for having me.

**John Bickley** (1:49)
So you were serving as the head of the CDC when the COVID pandemic broke out. And you also worked closely with Dr. Fauci before that. What was that experience like?

**Robert Redfield** (2:00)
Well, I had worked with Tony all the way back since the 1980s in AIDS. I was the CDC Director when he was the Director of Neurology and Infectious Disease. So I was the CDC Director all during the pandemic and a member of the White House Task Force. So I gave my professional opinion in January of 2020 that I felt that this was a non-natural occurring virus that was a consequence of scientific research in a laboratory. And I shared that with the President and the committee. Tony took the position that it was from nature, from the wet market. I think there was a lot of evidence that that was not correct. And he's a very smart individual, so I believe that he actually understood that that wasn't correct.
And he intentionally helped create what I call a roost that it came from the wet market, largely because NIH was involved, along with other government agencies, of actually funding that laboratory to do this research, which then ended up killing 20 million people. He was a big advocate of gain of function research, where you try to make pathogens more pathogenic and more transmissible. I was a big advocate of not doing gain of function research.
I wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal a number of years ago, really pushing our nation not to be involved in gain of function research. President Trump just recently put another moratorium on gain of function research. It's really important now if it can be enforced. Fauci wrote an op-ed in 2012, where he talked about the importance of gain of function research and why that research had to go forward. And in that op-ed, he said that if the consequence of doing this research is it results in a major pandemic, it's worth the risk. Well, the reality is it did result in a major pandemic.

**John Bickley** (4:00)
Now, you mentioned that there was evidence to suggest this virus did not emerge organically. What evidence was there?

**Robert Redfield** (4:07)
As a virologist, there's clear evidence. Actually, in the genome of the virus itself, so if you really understand how to read the genome, you can really find out that, wait a minute, this didn't come from nature. For example, as Rand Paul talked about, there's a furan cleavage site in this virus, and what that does is it splits the protein so that the binding domain of the virus now preferably recognizes the human receptor, but doesn't recognize the bat receptor. And when you look at those 12 nucleotides, they code for four amino acids, and the amino acid nucleotide sequence that they used, actually, you can have different triplets for different amino acids, and the triplet sequence that are used in this virus are the triplet sequence that is preferred by humans, not bats. So how does a human preferred sequence for, say, arginine, how does that get in this virus? When it used to be classified, it's declassified now, but when I reviewed this with Pompeo, who was Secretary of State, he asked me to help interpret all this data in his office under classified conditions.