April 1, 2021 (LifeSiteNews) — COVID-19 most likely escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan, China, former Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) director Dr. Robert Redfield said recently on CNN, mainstreaming a contention the left-wing media previously derided as conspiratorial.
“I am of the point of view that I still think the most likely etiology of this pathogen in Wuhan was from a laboratory, you know, escaped,” Redfield said in an interview with CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta that was filmed (but not released) in January, CBS News [1] reports. “Now, other people don’t believe that, that’s fine. Science will eventually figure it out. It’s not unusual for respiratory pathogens that are being worked on in the laboratory to infect the laboratory worker.”
“I do not believe this somehow came from a bat to a human,” he continued. “And at that moment in time, the virus came to the human, became one of the most infectious viruses that we know in humanity for human to human transmission. Normally, when a pathogen goes from a zoonotic to human, it takes a while for it to figure out how to become more and more efficient.”
In the earliest days of what became the COVID-19 pandemic, leading news outlets such as [2] CNN, the [3] New York Times, and the [4] Washington Post attacked Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) for peddling a “fringe,” “dangerous,” and “debunked conspiracy theory” when he said “we need to at least ask the question” of whether the coronavirus originated in a Wuhan lab. So-called “fact-checkers” favored by the mainstream media have also [5] attacked suggestions that it came from a lab.
Redfield also clarified that he does not believe the virus’s escape was intentional or that it was engineered by humans, and that he thinks it started spreading much earlier than commonly believed, possibly as early as September or October 2019.
After COVID-19’s outbreak was confirmed to have reached the United States last year, many anecdotes about unusually harsh flu experiences over the 2019 holiday season prompted speculation as to whether the virus was already present, but was largely dismissed by the mainstream media (possibly because it implied it was too late for lockdowns to contain the virus). Last May, the CDC [6] published a study admitting “SARS-CoV-2 infections may have been present in the U.S. in December 2019, earlier than previously recognized.”
[7] Controversial White House COVID-19 advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci took issue with Redfield’s comments, noting “there are other alternatives — others that most people hold by.”
During Redfield’s tenure at the CDC, he [8] echoed the establishment’s conventional wisdom on masking, but also [9] noted that the social isolation of school closures resulted in a greater number of deaths than COVID-19 did, and acknowledged that federal healthcare reimbursements gave hospitals an incentive to exaggerate their COVID-19 numbers.
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/covid-lab-theory-robert-redfield-no-evidence/
[2] https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/18/politics/tom-cotton-coronavirus/index.html
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/17/business/media/coronavirus-tom-cotton-china/
[4] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/02/16/tom-cotton-coronavirus-conspiracy/
[5} https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/facebook-fact-checkers-flag-lifesitenews-for-giving-dissenting-covid-info-a-platform
[6] https://academic.oup.com/cid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cid/ciaa1785/6012472
[7] https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/tucker-carlson-rips-into-fauci-on-social-distancing-calls-out-health-officials-for-double-standards-on-blm-riots
[8] https://www.lifesitenews.com/opinion/cdc-director-insists-masks-will-save-us-from-covid-evidence-suggests-otherwise
[9] https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/suicides-higher-than-covid-19-deaths-amid-school-lockdown-cdc-chief-warns
Source: lifesitenews.com/…/covid-19-probably-from-chinese-lab-spread-in-fall-2019-ex-cdc-chief-says