Former CDC Director Robert Redfield said on Wednesday that Dr. Anthony Fauci actively sought to exclude or silence anyone who failed to embrace his chosen narrative on the pandemic’s origins.
During a hearing before the House Oversight Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, Redfield claimed that Fauci — who served as the head of former President Donald Trump’s Coronavirus Response Team before taking on the role of chief medical adviser in President Joe Biden’s White House — had intentionally excluded him from conversations because he refused to fall in line.
“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 asserted during the hearing.
The former CDC director, a virologist himself, said that he was vocal even in January of 2020 about his suspicions that the novel coronavirus had likely originated in a lab. “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,” he explained — and he said that it was not long afterward that Fauci began working to exclude him from the conversation.
Redfield went on to detail a conference call that took place on February 2, 2020 — one that included both Fauci and Dr. Francis Collins, then head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and that he was not invited to join and did not learn about until a Freedom of Information Act request resulted in the publication of emails pertaining to the call.
“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.
Congressman James Comer (R-KY) pressed Redfield for details, asking, “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 replied. “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.”