Former CDC Director Received Death Threats From Scientists for Supporting Wuhan Lab Leak Theory

Then-Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield testifies to a congressional panel in Washington on Sept. 23, 2020. Alex Edelman/Pool via Reuters

Former U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Robert Redfield says he received death threats from fellow scientists after saying he suspected that the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus originated in a Wuhan laboratory.

Redfield told Vanity Fair in an interview published on June 3 that he received a significant amount of backlash after he told CNN earlier this year that he’s a proponent of the theory the virus leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China, contradicting the official narrative espoused by the CCP.

Saying he was “threatened and ostracized because I proposed another hypothesis,“ Redfield told the magazine that he “expected it from politicians. I didn’t expect it from science.”

Redfield noted that some death threats came from individuals who thought he was being racially insensitive, but other threats came from prominent scientists, whom he didn’t name.

In March, Redfield said that it is “not unusual for respiratory pathogens that are being worked on in a laboratory to infect a laboratory worker,” noting that he’s “spent [his] life” studying viruses.

“Normally, when a pathogen goes from a zoonot to human,” he added, “it takes a while for it to figure out how to become more and more efficient in human-to-human transmission.”

The P4 laboratory at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China, on April 17, 2020. Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images

Because of that, Redfield said the CCP virus, which causes the COVID-19 disease, most likely “was from a laboratory” in Wuhan, China, that had “escaped.” Also in the interview, Redfield said he suspected the viral pandemic started as a localized outbreak in Wuhan earlier than many have suspected—in September or October of 2019—instead of in December 2019 or January 2020.

“I’m of the point of view that I still think the most likely etiology of this pathology in Wuhan was from a laboratory—you know, escaped,” Redfield further said in the CNN interview. “Other people don’t believe that. That’s fine. Science will eventually figure it out.”

CCP officials claimed the virus first emerged in December 2019, at a wet market in Wuhan several miles from the Wuhan lab. However, the Chinese regime has provided scant details about how the virus was transmitted and hasn’t been able to pinpoint the animal that spread the virus to humans.

At the same time, the CCP has received criticism from the international community, including human rights organizations, for its attempts to cover up the origin of the virus and for silencing doctors, whistleblowers, and others.

The World Health Organization has previously speculated that the virus was transmitted from a bat through an intermediary animal.

President Joe Biden last month said that a number of officials within the U.S. intelligence community, the group of 17 agencies led by the Office of Director of National Intelligence, suspects that the virus came from the Wuhan lab and announced they would investigate the matter.