Dr. Robert Redfield, the former CDC Director, alleged that Dr. Anthony Fauci actively tried to silence or exclude individuals who did not conform to his preferred narrative on the origins of the pandemic.
Redfield made these accusations while testifying before the House Oversight Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic on Wednesday, the Daily Wire reported.
According to Redfield, Fauci, who previously headed the Coronavirus Response Team under former President Donald Trump, deliberately excluded him from discussions as he did not agree with Fauci’s viewpoint.
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“This was an a priori 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. And as I say, I was only the CDC director, and I was sidelined,” Redfield said during the hearing.
The former CDC director, who is also a virologist, stated that he expressed his doubts in January 2020 that the novel coronavirus likely originated in a lab. He said, “I think I made it very clear in January [2020] to all of them why we had to aggressively pursue this. 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 said not long afterward, Fauci began to exclude him from discussions about how to proceed against the virus.
Redfield elaborated on a conference call that occurred on February 2, 2020, which included Fauci and Dr. Francis Collins, who was the head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) at the time. Redfield was not invited to participate and was not informed about it until emails related to the call were made public through a Freedom of Information Act request, the Daily Wire said.
“I didn’t know there was a February 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,” Redfield said.
Rep. James Comer (R-KY) pressed Redfield for a further explanation: “Why would they do this?”
“Because I had a different point of view. 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 responded. “Science never selects a single narrative. We foster — as my colleagues just said — we foster debate. And we’re confident that with debate, science will eventually get to the truth.”
