(Ken Silva, Headline USA) From the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Robert Redfield has been one of the leading voices arguing that the disease didn’t originate naturally, but was engineered in a lab.
But unlike most lab-leak theorists, Refdield doesn’t think COVID was made at the in China. Instead, he recently said he believes it’s more likely that COVID-19 was engineered at the University of North Carolina—the research home for Dr. Ralph Baric, who has been described in legal disputes as a “close collaborator with the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”
“When you look at the accountability for China, their accountability is not in the lab work and the creation of the virus,” Redfield said last week on the Third Opinion podcast—as first reported by the Carolina Journal.
“Their accountability is not following the international health regulations after they realized that they had a problem and allowing people like me, at the CDC to come in and to help them within 48 hours like they were obligated to based on the treaty. [The U.S.] funded the research, both from NIH, the State Department, USAID, and the Defense Department. All four of those agencies helped fund this research.”
According to Redfield, UNC’s Dr. Baric was the “scientific mastermind behind the research.”
“I think he probably helped create some of the original viral lines, but I can’t prove that, but he was very involved,” Redfield said, according to the Journal. “I think there is a real possibility that the virus’s birthplace was Chapel Hill.”
Redfield’s statement comes as Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., is set to sprearhead a comprehensive investigation into the origins of COVID as the next chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee.
“NIH and HHS have refused to turn over the documents as to why Wuhan got this research money and why it wasn’t screened as dangerous research,” Paul reportedly said on Fox News earlier this month.
“I’m looking forward to getting those [documents], mainly because we need to try to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”
Ken Silva is a staff writer at Headline USA. Follow him at x.com/jd_cashless.
