On Wednesday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “America Reports,” former CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield reacted to reporting from Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi, and Alex Gutentag on the origins of COVID-19 by stating that he does find the report largely credible, and that he believes Dr. Anthony Fauci’s stance in the COVID origins debate is “Largely…grounded in his advocacy for gain-of-function research.”
Redfield said, “I suspect their information is grounded in truth. We’ll have to see what the intelligence community releases next week.” Although, he added he thinks there is “strong evidence” of people contracting COVID-19 in the lab in September and November of 2019, while the Shellenberger, Taibbi, Gutentag report places the first infections in November of 2019 and that there is a possibility of the virus originating from another lab in Wuhan aside from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Later, he added, “Tony and I have been friends for a long time. But I’m very disappointed in how he’s responded to this. Largely, I think it’s grounded in his advocacy for gain-of-function research. I think you know, he’s a strong advocate for gain-of-function research and I’m a strong advocate for a moratorium on gain-of-function research. The investigative report that you were just talking about suggests that these three scientists were the initial infections in November, although I think there was evidence for infections back in early September also, but it’s of note that they were the key scientists that were leading the gain-of-function research in that laboratory.”
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