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Former CDC Director: SARS-CoV-2 Escaped from Wuhan Institute of Virology

by Toby Young
26 March 2021 4:50 PM

A former director of the CDC in the US – Robert Redfield – has told a CNN interviewer that he believes the virus escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology and didn’t originate in the city’s wet market. MailOnline has more.

The former director of the CDC, Robert Redfield, says he believes COVID-19 “escaped” from Wuhan lab in China and may have been circling as early as September 2019.

Redfield made the admission in a CNN interview on Friday but stressed it was his “opinion”.

It is the first time Redfield, who was appointed CDC director by President Trump, has stated publicly that he believes COVID-19 originated in a lab and not in a wet market where an initial cluster of cases was linked to.

“I’m of the point of view that I still think the most likely etiology of this pathogen in Wuhan was from a laboratory… escaped. Other people don’t believe that, that’s fine. Science will eventually figure it out,” he said.

“It’s not unusual for respiratory pathogens that are being worked on in laboratories to infect the laboratory worker.

“That’s not implying any intentionality. It’s my opinion, right? But I am a virologist. I have spent my life in virology.”

Worth reading in full.

Stop Press: Readers of Lockdown Sceptics won’t need reminding that this hypothesis used to be dismissed as a “conspiracy theory”. But the theory is gaining more and more traction and is the subject of Matt Ridley’s next book.

Tags: CDCConspiracy TheoriesMatt RidleyWuhan Institute of Virology

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30 Comments
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realarthurdent
realarthurdent
4 years ago

The universal massive over-reaction to the virus all over the Western world led me to believe that the authorities were far more worried about this virus than the average common or garden zoonotic virus from Asia for a very particular reason. Was the very particular reason the fact that they knew early on that the virus was man-made and were therefore were worried it might not behave like a “normal” zoonotic virus?

25
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RickH
RickH
4 years ago
Reply to  realarthurdent

That was an explanation that was in my mind also. If various security services were passing on intelligence about the escape of a likely synthetic ‘gain of function’ virus, it would explain the incontinent twitchiness of a generation of pretty inadequate and gullible politicians.

F. knows where we’d have been if there was a ‘Cuban missile crisis’ situation!

15
-2
PoshPanic
PoshPanic
4 years ago
Reply to  realarthurdent

That is a definite possibility. Occams Razor like

5
0
iane
iane
4 years ago
Reply to  realarthurdent

Nope, I don’t think so – they just wanted an excuse (any excuse) for launching totalitarianism openly.

13
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RickH
RickH
4 years ago
Reply to  iane

‘they’ ??? Out of thin air?? Across Europe??

Nah. Better or more credible explanation(s) needed.

6
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Ken Garoo
Ken Garoo
4 years ago
Reply to  RickH

They being the ‘Davos Boyz’ for example.

Plus the west has been running large scale ‘bioweapon’ training exercises, involving the NHS in the UK.

In Russia and China, they considered the virus may be man made but discounted it. They did however resort to building large-scale isolation hospitals, ‘just in case’. In the UK, the nearest thing would be the Nightingale Hospitals but they were intended to benefit insiders, not the public. They have since been dismantled, which makes total sense if real attacks are expected.

As always, the question to ask is ‘qui bono’? China? US/UK corporate/government insiders? Big Pharma? Russia? Someone else?

It is clear who has lost out, the British and to a lesser extent, the American people. They haven’t lost because of the disease, but because of pre-planned political acts.

This Bulgarian journalist has done good things (to the extent of being warned off by Bulgarian state security) about the arms supply for ISIS and the US DTRA program, especially in Tbilisi, Georgia.

https://thealtworld.com/author/dilyana_gaytandzhieva

The US researchers in DTRA outsourced labs are given diplomatic status (which means their luggage connot be searched) and the host country has no say in what goes on.

Last edited 4 years ago by Ken Garoo
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RickH
RickH
4 years ago
Reply to  Ken Garoo

Less credible in terms of the concerted initial reaction. Doesn’t ‘smell’ right as a comprehensive explanation.

I have no doubt that there are overlapping motivations and a lot of opportunism as well.

6
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J4mes
J4mes
4 years ago
Reply to  RickH

You can’t smell anything, Rick, because your head is still stuck in the sand. You ask [demand] an explanation, Ken gave you one that probably took time out his day. Why don’t you give him a decent response?

3
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Tillysmum
Tillysmum
4 years ago
Reply to  RickH

I do wish people would do some research. Davos. UN Agenda 21 and 30. It’s all out there and getting very late

2
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peyrole
peyrole
4 years ago
Reply to  realarthurdent

If the alarm call had gone out in January I could give this credence, but it didn’t, they waited until March to pull the trigger. ‘They’ being the US who knew exactly what was happening in Wuhan as they funded it.

10
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karenovirus
karenovirus
4 years ago
Reply to  realarthurdent

In late February 2020 I twice came across a chap who was in recovery from an unknown condition.
He had self presented at A&E with ‘pneumonia’ having returned from a business trip to China, specifically Wuhan.

(This did not register with me as abnormal at the time even though ‘new virus, China’ and possibly ‘Wuhan’ were creating some ripples in the overseas sections of some media).

At A&E he was immediately put into total isolation with staff wearing full on Hazmat Suits, zipped up plastic onesies and Star Trek helmets.
He was tested for this that and the other but at the end of the day did not have what came to be known as the Covid.

What later struck me was that before Covid/Pandemic had become a thing in the West clinicians at my small provincial hospital were clearly expecting something ‘viral’, from China, specifically Wuhan.
I suspect this awareness came from a doctory intraweb rather than the DoH.

9
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Ken Garoo
Ken Garoo
4 years ago
Reply to  karenovirus

I had the damn thing in Dec 2019/Jan 2020 – three times in a period of 6 weeks. It was bad (totally bed ridden for 2 weeks, living off fluids), but not as bad as bacterial pneumonia (resistant to multiple anti-biotics) I had after a 2017 flu. Fortunately I had it before the big UK fear porn started, so I didn’t know I (OAP, asthmatic) was supposed to die. Of the two, give me covid.

6
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Beowa
Beowa
4 years ago
Reply to  karenovirus

The wife and I were on holiday in Edinburgh at the end of October 2019, the hotel had several Chinese tourists staying for a couple of nights on coach tours
10 days after we returned home we were both ill with “A Flu Like Virus”
Normally with flu I get it worse than my wife this time she was really poorly with it
I’m blood group O she is A
Took until February to really shake it off

The virus was here much earlier than the government think

1
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Anonymous
Anonymous
4 years ago

Escaped from a Wuhan lab and jumped right out of mainland China failing to not touching the surrounding environs and settling in the heart of western liberal democracy?

Interesting hypothesis…

12
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BeBopRockSteady
BeBopRockSteady
4 years ago
Reply to  Anonymous

If only we’d locked down earlier eh 🙂

2
0
karenovirus
karenovirus
4 years ago
Reply to  Anonymous

Settling initially into northern Italy with a reported half million Chinese guest workers, not classed as Resident so travelling frequently to and from home in China.

Chinese students settling in their thousands in the heart of the most advanced cities throughout the west. My small provincial city university has some thousands of Chinese students, those from Wuhan were quietly isolated and tested in early March 2020 but all were clear.

2
0
Anonymous
Anonymous
4 years ago
Reply to  karenovirus

That would make sense if they were travelling only between Wuhan and Italy and not China as a whole. But China as a whole didn’t see and hasn’t seen large scale infections and lockdowns in anywhere outside Wuhan in Hubei province.

Presumably those chinese students settling in the west were also not doing so solely from Wuhan?

An don’t forget that Italy downgraded its covid numbers by something like 90% and that is still ignored by the MSM. So the whole Bergamo thing was not covid specifically and it has quietly returned to normal.

Last edited 4 years ago by Anonymous
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Ken Garoo
Ken Garoo
4 years ago
Reply to  Anonymous

It even managed to infect SPanish water quality reference samples dating to March 2019. This virus is amazing. Not only has it eliminated all other diease, it has managed time travel.

I, for one, welcome our new Chinese-time-travelling-virus-creating overlords.

4
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awildgoose
awildgoose
4 years ago

Note how Fauci immediately appeared to do damage control.

9
0
Matt Mounsey
Matt Mounsey
4 years ago

You know what the implications of this are for the gene based vaccines, right?

China releases the virus, then releases the gene sequence. The sequence isn’t from an isolated virus, it’s a “de novo assembly”, basically a computer model from many RNA strands detected by PCR. So the Chinese release a virus that’s been heavily modified to infect humans and then releases a genetic sequence that will be used for a vaccine. Not the actual virus, but a sequence.

You know what stops the spread of viruses? It isn’t social distancing or mask wearing, it’s the genetic variation across the human immune system. The virus goes through a Gompertz Curve where it has to modify itself to spread because every immune system is slightly different and responds slightly differently. If all immune systems were the same, viruses would affect all people equally and spread exponentially, but they don’t. But if the virus has something predictable and similar to bind to across all the immune systems it attacks, then it can be far more effective and wipe out as many people as it likes.

Is anyone getting suspicious that we’re being played by the Chinese? How would the Western world have reacted if the virus had started in Russia? Do you think we might have adopted more of a Cold War stance? I think so, so why haven’t we? Could it be that so much of the science we can’t do in the West for regulatory reasons is done in China with Western money? All those programs would end overnight if China were culpable.

David Asher, another US State Department regular, went on Sky News Australia to speculate that China may well have been working on a bioweapon and Covid was part of the vaccine against it. He said this because of the presence of adenovirus in the Covid sequence samples, which indicate vaccine research (same as in AstraZeneca vaccine). He believes they were working on an antidote to a bioweapon they have, because why create a vaccine to some obscure, highly modified coronavirus? What would be the point? A vaccine has to be designed to be highly specific to a known virus, so creating a vaccine for something you don’t have is pointless.

I think we need to seriously consider that China is developing these bioweapons and prepare accordingly. We need our intelligence services to tell us their assessment. What’s the point in them if they can’t tell us whether China is working on these weapons and what Covid’s role in it was? GCHQ and MI5 have been completely silent.

We also need to ask what the implications for gene based vaccines are vs traditional inactivated virus vaccines, vs prophylactics like Ivermectin and maintaining a strong immune system. I know which option I’m betting on at the moment.

16
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SueJM
SueJM
4 years ago
Reply to  Matt Mounsey

Good points. But it’s been over a year now and is obvious that this particular ‘bioweapon’ has achieved very little. The ‘vaccines’ however have yet to stand in the limelight.

2
0
Matt Mounsey
Matt Mounsey
4 years ago
Reply to  SueJM

I didn’t say it was a bioweapon. Sorry, I know I wrote a lot but in the 4th paragraph I shared David Asher’s speculation that it was released while working on a vaccine to another bioweapons program.

But if you don’t think it’s achieved very much, then why are we still locked down a year later?

The danger in the vaccines is that they may create predictability in the immune system for a future engineered virus to take advantage of. By manipulating ADE for example.

2
0
PoshPanic
PoshPanic
4 years ago

My biggest disappointment with this story is, I don’t have any popcorn in the house.

4
0
Enjoyeverysandwich
Enjoyeverysandwich
4 years ago

An article I picked up sometime ago…

https://greatgameindia.com/coronavirus-bioweapon/

2
0
DBSR
DBSR
4 years ago

Sir Richard Dearlove (ex MI6) said the same on the outstanding Planet Normal podcast, last June.

Last edited 4 years ago by DBSR
5
0
Ken Garoo
Ken Garoo
4 years ago

The US has hundreds of outsourced bioweapons research labs around the world (including Porton Down). These are located around the borders of Russia and China. The US military has been collecting ‘Russian’ DNA and a US team was kicked out of China for collecting DNA of Chinese without permit. A large number of these labs are in Africa, with frequent outbreaks of ‘new’ disease in relatively close vicinity.

comment image

The gain-of-function research necessary originated in the US. US and UK also funded research at the private Wuhan lab. The UK organisation stated it had no connection with the potential outbreak of human disease as it was working on animal diseases. (Nice Chinese Whisper play there)

It is unlikely that SARS-CoV-2 was man-made, but the political exploitation certainly made it into a weapon, conveniently the the major indebted countries of the west, the US and the UK. After all, the disease is largely harmless to the great majority of people, and the west’s response was driven by western insiders, not the Evil Chinese.

5
0
Adamb
Adamb
4 years ago

I suppose no one will ever know for sure. For me, it would explain the panicked reaction, in that the Chinese authorities knew they would be held responsible for any subsequent spread.

3
0
SueJM
SueJM
4 years ago

When you first buy a new make of car you start seeing it everywhere. Then if you’re really tuned in you start finding paraphernalia to go with your car. Then you settle into it and take little notice anymore….. unless you’re a car enthusiast.

Last edited 4 years ago by SueJM
2
0
BJs Brain is Missing
BJs Brain is Missing
4 years ago

All biological weapons should be banned and the research of, should also be banned. They are incredibly evil in my opinion.

4
0
ANH
ANH
4 years ago

I find it incredible that anyone would not come to that conclusion. The only lab in China, or anywhere else probably, that studies this kind of virus just happens to be in Wuhan which is where the first cases are found. It’s a slam dunk surely?

1
0

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