Determining the pandemic origin is a matter of history, not politics nor blame. We cannot hope for the collapse of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to answer this question as it did with the deadly Sverdlovsk anthrax lab leak after Soviet Union dissolved. Somehow we need the CCP’s cooperation in order to proceed, as often expressed by Western officials, is simply disingenuous. It is passing the buck of responsibility that is owed to the millions who have died.
Robert Redfield, the former director of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), dropped a bombshell in his latest interview that National Institute of Health (NIH) leaders, Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci, actively covered up a likely lab origin of COVID. Wuhan labs house the world’s leading collection of novel coronaviruses, many of them unpublished, and their biosafety risk was forewarned. Redfield further added that there are classified information pointing to an accidental leak.
Redfield said: “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.” He further stated: “I knew it was orchestrated. Fauci and Collins … used their political power within the scientific community to set the narrative. … What Collins and Fauci did was not science. It was a political decision.”
Redfield’s assertion is backed by NIH emails obtained via the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) which revealed that Collins placed highest priority on “international harmony” than investigating Covid’s origin. Cynically, Fauci brushed aside the origin inquiry as “a shiny object that will go away.” These are not the expected attitudes nor reactions of NIH leaders at America’s renowned science agency.
The CCP was known to have provided flawed and incomplete data to WHO at the start of the pandemic, shutting down databases at Wuhan Institute of virology (WIV), issuing gag orders on COVID origin reporting, and publishing false scientific articles suggesting pangolin was the host. However, the real shocker is the obstructive role played by NIH leaders and a small clique of Western virologists in selling a false market origin narrative. The odd coupling of the virology establishment and the CCP is unmistakable, as both used the media to suppress and shift the attention away from gain-of-function (GoF) experiments conducted at WIV, some partially funded by the NIH.
This article first appeared in RealClear Policy on 10/7/2022
