The former head of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said he was “sidelined” over his views on the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Dr Robert Redfield was the key witness in a US congressional committee’s first public hearing as it investigates how the coronavirus emerged.
He said he was cut out of early discussions on where the virus came from because he suspected a lab leak.
The accusation was dismissed by Dr Anthony Fauci as “completely untrue”. Many scientists point out there is no evidence that Covid leaked from a lab.
The White House has said there is no consensus across the US government on the virus’s origins. Some studies suggest the virus made the leap from animals to humans in Wuhan, China, possibly at the city’s seafood and wildlife market.
The market is near the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a world-leading virus laboratory that conducted research into coronaviruses.
Dr Redfield, who led the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention when the outbreak began in 2020, was an early proponent of the lab leak theory.
He told the House select subcommittee, formed by the new Republican majority in the US House of Representatives, it was “not scientifically plausible” to him that the virus had natural origins.
He claimed he was “sidelined” at the beginning of the pandemic and excluded from meetings as his views were not in line with other major scientists like Dr Fauci, the de-facto face of the US pandemic response.
“It was told to me that they wanted a single narrative and that I obviously had a different point of view,” he said. “Science has debate and they squashed any debate.”
Dr Fauci, who was not present at the hearing, denied Dr Redfield’s accusation. “No one excluded anyone,” he told US news outlet Politico after the hearing.
“And the idea of saying that he was not wanted there because he had a different opinion … there were several people on the call who had the opinion that it might have been an engineered virus,” said Dr Fauci, who retired from his government roles in December.
