On Monday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “The Story,” former CDC Director Robert Redfield argued that comparisons between the COVID virus and SARS and MERS made by former NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins and former White House Chief Medical Adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci in their arguments against the lab leak theory are “misleading” and COVID is “nothing like SARS and MERS.”
Redfield said, [relevant remarks begin around 1:45] “[S]cientifically, I think the argument that Fauci and Collins and others have made that this was from nature because it was like SARS and like MERS is misleading. Because both SARS and MERS, when they came from a bat, into an intermediate host, and then into man, never learned how to go man-to-man. In the first epidemic of SARS, and MERS, it was less than 1,000 cases. And we sit here today, 18 years later, it’s less than 10,000 cases. COVID came from — into man and immediately was enormously transmissible. Which, in my view, meant that it was educated in a laboratory how to infect human tissue. … And so, I find it really upsetting to me scientifically when good scientists get up and say hey, it has to be a spillover event from nature because…that’s like SARS and that’s like MERS, and in fact, it’s nothing like SARS and MERS. It’s nothing like that at all. This is extremely unique.”
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