On Monday’s broadcast of Hill.TV’s “Rising,” former CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield stated that the media went along with the NIH’s “antithetical to science” approach to COVID origins and cited the recent coverage of findings on a possible link between COVID and raccoon dogs that don’t add anything as major news as an example of this.
Redfield said, “I don’t think it really adds anything. I think it’s important, first, they didn’t that the raccoon dogs were actually infected. What they showed was they could have DNA from raccoon dogs on swabs that they also had the COVID virus on, so. It’s also not unusual for animals to be infected, as opposed to being the intermediate reservoir. For example, … in the United States, a substantial number of the white-tailed deer are infected with COVID. Dogs can be infected with COVID. Cats can be infected with COVID. Minks can be infected with COVID. So, all they did was show that, in the same swab, they had nucleic acid from a raccoon dog and nucleic acid from COVID. So, the dogs could have been infected. They could not have been infected, they could have just been in the same space where the virus was. The other problem I have with all of this — and I wish these authors, rather than publish in The Atlantic…they’d put their data out into a scientific peer-reviewed journal where it can be critically reviewed — I do want to remind people that we have really strong evidence that this pandemic did not start in December/January. It actually probably started somewhere between August, September, October.”
He added, “I think the whole approach — particularly by the leadership of NIH, I’ve said this before — was antithetical to science. … It was very quick…that the NIH took a very aggressive stance, as did many of the scientists, that the only acceptable hypothesis was spillover. And unfortunately, the media went in. I mean, the article that you started out [with]. It’s not even a scientific article. It’s a comment in The Atlantic…in The New York Times, and yet it becomes major news, as if there’s a strong bias, in my view, towards trying to promote the spillover hypothesis, rather than having what I consider an honest, scientific debate, where, I’ve always said, if people prove that I’m wrong, I thank them, because then I learned something. If you prove to me that I’m right, I’m not as thankful, because you didn’t teach me anything. This should be a scientific debate, and it hasn’t been. It’s been a geopolitical decision for a single narrative, which is unfortunate, and, as I said, is antithetical to science.”
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