ARROGANT scientists engineered Covid in a lab – and underestimated its danger before it leaked, the former head of America’s top health agency has claimed.
Dr Robert Redfield, 73, spent his career preparing for a catastrophic pandemic – and was “aggressively” silenced when he voiced fears Covid may have leaked from a lab in China.
Donald Trump answering questions with Dr Robert Redfield (right) in 2020[/caption]
Chinese virologist Shi Zhengli pictured at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in 2017 – the lab under fire over the origins of Covid[/caption]
US President Donald Trump and Dr Robert Redfield at a White House briefing on April 22, 2020[/caption]
Speaking to The Sun for our documentary The Covid Files: Inside the Wuhan lab-leak scandal, Dr Redfield lifted the lid on the early days of the pandemic in 2020 that killed millions.
The ex-chief of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention revealed how he was in the White House with Donald Trump when he called China’s president Xi Jinping.
Watch the documentary in full on our YouTube channel here
From his home in Maryland, the top virologist told how Don begged Xi to let the US send a team to China to probe the origins of the mystery bug sweeping the country.
Dr Redfield told us: “I went to ask President Trump if he would call the president of China, which he did. I was there in the Oval Office.
“But we never got an answer on any of our requests.”
He believes his counterpart in China “felt limited in what he could say” about the pandemic.
If Xi had allowed a team of experts into the country, Dr Redfield says the pandemic would have taken a very different path, and potentially saved lives.
Dr Redfield said: “It would have changed our entire public policy.
“If we had got in, I would have learned, probably within a week, that this virus was very human-to-human transmissible.
“I think they already knew that. They’re scientists and doctors. They knew it was highly infectious for humans.”
Five years later, the world still has no answers about the origins of the virus that has left more than seven million people dead.
The CIA, FBI and the US Department of Energy have all backed a lab leak as the most likely explanation – with many pointing the finger at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
China’s Wuhan lab has been at the centre of the storm since Covid emerged just miles from the facility – which was famous for its research on bat coronaviruses.
Many believe Covid leaked from the US-funded lab during risky virus tests.
[This] is as close to a smoking gun as you can get. This is the evidence that this was created in the laboratory
Dr Robert Redfield
Despite years of searching, a natural origin has never been found.
Dr Redfield, a former US Army officer at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, said Covid was “ready-made” for humans and this immediately rang alarm bells.
Scientists have repeatedly said that Covid was “exquisitely matched”, “completely pre-adapted” and “supercharged” for humans.
With the lab’s close links to Xi’s military, Dr Redfield believes the army was looking to create a vaccine that would protect the Chinese population against diseases.
It needed to be highly infectious, asymptomatic and not create long-term immunity – the same features as Covid, Dr Redfield pointed out.
But he claimed the researchers in Wuhan were “arrogant” – and they underestimated the danger of their work if it ever accidentally leaked from the lab.
Security guards keep watch outside Wuhan Institute of Virology during the visit by the World Health Organisation[/caption]
Dr Redfield said: “They were arrogant. They didn’t see the downside.
“[It was] scientific arrogance to think that nothing could go wrong.
“This was not natural. This was orchestrated. This was a purposeful research programme.”
Just months before the mystery pneumonia-like virus emerged, the lab made a series of suspicious decisions, Dr Redfield claimed.
This included handing over control to the military, deleting the lab’s database of sequences in a “highly irregular” move, and putting out a contract for a new ventilation system.
“I think that’s when the pandemic started,” Dr Redfield said.
“People said I was speculating when I said it came from the lab.
“I wasn’t speculating. I was putting together a number of pieces of scientific evidence to come up with what I think is a rock solid hypothesis.
The Sun’s Imogen Braddick with Dr Robert Redfield[/caption]
The Great Covid Cover-up
By Imogen Braddick, Assistant Foreign Editor
FEW of us had heard of the Chinese city of Wuhan when the world was first paralysed by Covid-19 five years ago.
Today, the sprawling metropolis is synonymous with the pandemic that claimed 227,000 lives in the UK — along with its sinister labs where top secret biological experiments are carried out.
Within the first few days of Britain’s initial lockdown in March 2020, as millions were confined to their homes, questions were already being asked about whether Wuhan’s Institute of Virology could be behind the outbreak.
Now, as the country marks the five-year anniversary of Covid-19, an exclusive documentary by The Sun reveals the experts, scientists and investigators who not only believe the virus was caused by a lab leak, but that American scientists helped to cover up the scandal.
Our documentary took me to the heart of the origins of Covid and explores whether China was trying to cover up the creation of a biological weapon by blaming the pandemic on a wet food market 17 miles away.
We also reveal that, while scientists publicly insisted the disease came from “natural” sources, behind the scenes they were exchanging messages about a laboratory leak.
One expert told us: “Watergate was nothing compared to this.
“This is the Chernobyl of biology.”
Dr Robert Redfield, the former head of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said that a few months before the pandemic, the Wuhan Institute was taken over by the Chinese military while officials deleted its databases and took on a contract for a new ventilation system.
We now know that three lab researchers fell ill in November 2019 — a month before the first Covid cases were reported to the World Health Organisation.
“I think that’s when the pandemic started,” said Dr Redfield, describing a “frenzied cover-up that was keeping Chinese President Xi Jinping up at night”.
The US virologist says he was “aggressively silenced” when he voiced fears Covid had leaked from the lab, where “Batwoman” scientist Shi Zhengli was carrying out experiments on strains of coronavirus.
“If [the intelligence] was put forward in a digestible way, I think there would be broad consensus about the origin of this virus.”
Like dozens of other scientists and experts, Dr Redfield believes Covid had “signature sequences of laboratory manipulation”.
For years, Shi Zhengli – the lead scientist at the Wuhan lab dubbed “batwoman” – manipulated viruses to make them more infectious in humans, experts claim.
And many scientists believe the answers to the origins of Covid lies in the unique make-up of the virus.
Early on, they found the genetic code for what is known as a “furin cleavage site”.
It boosts the ability of a virus to jump between species, and can make it more transmissible.
This feature could exist in nature but Covid-19 is the only one scientists have found it in so far.
As a result, many experts believe it was inserted by researchers.
Dr Redfield said: “The furin cleavage site is as close to a smoking gun as you can get.
“This is the evidence that this was created in the laboratory.
“You ask the question, ‘Why does the Covid that came from bats no longer efficiently infect bats?’
“The reason is that they changed the orientation of the binding site so that it infects humans.
“That was the virology that said this was not natural.”
The virus that came out… is pretty much the virus they describe in the research proposal. That’s the virus that would cause a pandemic all around the world
Dr Robert Redfield
American scientists had been working with the Wuhan lab for more than a decade experimenting with bat coronaviruses.
Just a year before Covid emerged, US researchers applied for funding to engineer coronaviruses in China.
The 2018 proposal – called DEFUSE – reveals how scientists planned to engineer a virus that has a striking similarity to the genetic make-up of Covid.
The grant proposal was ultimately rejected by the US government.
However, engineering experiments could have been carried out regardless with other funding.
Dr Redfield said: “There are lots of sources of funding outside of the US government that could have been used.
“Most of us don’t write grants that we don’t already have data to know that it’s going to work.
“The virus that came out… is pretty much the virus they describe in the research proposal.
“That’s the virus that would cause a pandemic all around the world.”
The Wuhan lab has been at the centre of the lab leak theory since Covid emerged just miles from the facility[/caption]
