Former CDC director Robert Redfield: COVID-19 Likely To Have Emerged From Lab, WHO Too 'Compromised' To Conduct Probe In To Pandemic Origin

Robert Redfield, the former director of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Prevention, has said that lab leak was the most likely explanation for the origin of COVID-19 pandemic.

In an exclusive interview to Fox News, the former CDC director pointed out that COVID-19’s efficient human-to-human spread contradicted the behavior of other deadly coronaviruses with similar profiles, such as SARS and MERS.

An American virologist, Redfield served as director of the CDC, and the administrator of the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry from 2018 to 2021. CDC is the the national public health agency of U.S.

Speaking on the dangers of gain-of-function research, and the potential for lab-leak scenarios as the potential origin of coronavirus pandemic, Redfield warned against too much self-confidence in the scientific community.

Redfield said that some scientists and researchers tend to show "arrogance" toward the infallibility of their work, believing that nothing can or will go wrong.

"It may be, in fact, that unfortunately that's not true anymore, that something did go wrong, and not intentionally," said Redfield.

Redfield added that there is a possibility a worker or workers could have contracted a virus and simply been asymptomatic – leading to further infections that weren't so.

"It's not unfeasible that this virus escaped asymptomatically. And eventually, as cases developed in the elderly, we began to recognize an epidemic," said Redfield.

"I've already told my own personal opinion, and it's worth just what it is. You know, I'm a virologist. I was head of CDC at the time of the pandemic and I've worked with China for more than 20 years," the former Trump administration official added.

"My view is that it's more likely that this came from the laboratory than it came from nature."

Redfield also said that World Health Organization was “too compromised” in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic to conduct a thorough investigation of the origins of the coronavirus.

“I think they were highly compromised,” Redfield added “Clearly, they were incapable of compelling China to adhere to the treaty agreements that they have on global health, because they didn’t do that. Clearly, they allowed China to define the group of scientists that could come and investigate.”

The WHO has been subject to considerable criticism for its tepid early response to the outbreak. Health authorities in Taiwan, which is blocked by China from joining the WHO, have criticized the organization for allegedly failing to communicate their warning that coronavirus was transmissible between humans.

Incidentally the only American on the WHO team was Peter Daszak, whose research non-profit EcoHealth Alliance funneled millions in NIH grant money to the Wuhan lab.