Former CDC Director's Narrative-Busting Comments to CNN on Coronavirus Origins, Timing
The clip generating the most discussion is the one featuring the narrative-busting comments of former CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield. As you read the equivocations in CNN’s write-up of the interview and listen to the on-air remarks of their commentators, be prepared. This is a crazymaking, gaslighting, rewriting of history.
From Gupta’s overview posted at CNN.com:
While every doctor harbored deep suspicions about the information initially coming from China, Redfield was the most vocal about it. He believes the current pandemic began in Wuhan as a localized outbreak in September or October of 2019 — much earlier than the official timeline — and then spread to every province in China over the next couple of months. The United States wasn’t formally notified of the “mysterious cluster of pneumonia patients” until December 31, 2019.
Of course, this will be spun (and has been spun in the past) as “Donald Trump knew and did nothing,” which is a lie, since we all remember Pelosi and others’ upsetness when Trump halted travel from China and then from Europe, and their very early claims that calling the virus the China flu or the Wuhan flu was racist.
Redfield claims that even his counterpart at the China CDC wasn’t fully aware of the magnitude of the problem until January 2020:
And while the rest of the world was told the only initial Covid-19 cases in China had originated from a wet market in Wuhan, Redfield is confident the evidence suggests that was simply not the case. According to Redfield, even his counterpart at the China CDC, Dr. George Gao, was initially left in the dark about the magnitude of the problem until early January. He described a private phone call he had with Gao in early January 2020, when Gao became distraught and started crying after finding “a lot of cases” among individuals who had not been to the wet market. Gao, Redfield says, “came to the conclusion that the cat was out of the bag.”
The initial mortality rates in China were somewhere between “5-10%,” Redfield told me. “I’d probably be cryin’ too,” he added.
Redfield addresses the “bat soup” origin claim. Looking back on it now, the story is so absurd that it’s almost embarrassing that so many people believed it.
So far, the official word has been that this pandemic started when the novel coronavirus was introduced through an intermediary species or jumped directly from a bat to a human….
Reminding me that his career has been spent as a virologist, he told me, “I do not believe this somehow came from a bat to a human. 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 zoo, not to a human, it takes a while for it to figure out how to become more and more efficient in human to human transmission. I just don’t think that this makes biological sense.”
And, of course, Wuhan is the home of the Wuhan Institute of Virology and is known to do work on coronaviruses.
It’s my opinion – and I am allowed to have opinions now. 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. 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 a laboratory to affect the laboratory worker.
Redfield doesn’t assign any intentionality to the release of the virus from the lab, but again says that the level of sophistication of the virus as it came to the world wasn’t like a virus that originates in nature.
“Most of us in a lab, when trying to grow a virus, we try to help make it grow better, and better, and better, and better, and better, and better so we can do experiments and figure out about it. That’s the way I put it together.”
CNN is already downplaying Redfield’s comments, saying that the WHO didn’t back up those claims, and playing a clip of Fauci’s response to Redfield’s comments. Even though it’s CNN, Sunday night’s special looks like a must-watch.
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