While Covid-19 is a serious disease, the vast majority of deaths in the United States could’ve been avoided.
That was the consensus that emerged amongst the six doctors responsible for the Trump administration’s initial pandemic response, according to CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta. Gupta recently interviewed Dr. Deborah Birx, Dr. Anthony Fauci, Dr. Brett Giroir, Dr. Stephen Hahn, Dr. Robert Kadlec and Dr. Robert Redfield for a new special set to air on Sunday night.
Dr. Redfield, the former CDC director, offered a damning portrait of China’s early role in managing – or rather, covering up – the pandemic. As Gupta writes:
[Redfield] believes the current pandemic began in Wuhan as a localized outbreak in September or October of 2019 — much earlier than the official timeline — and then spread to every province in China over the next couple of months. The United States wasn’t formally notified of the “mysterious cluster of pneumonia patients” until December 31, 2019. Those were critical weeks and months that countries around the world could’ve been preparing.
Redfield describes a phone call he had with his counterpart at China CDC, Dr. George Gao, in January 2020 that indicated the pandemic did not initiate from a wet market as initially announced:
Gao became distraught and started crying after finding “a lot of cases” among individuals who had not been to the wet market. Gao, Redfield says, “came to the conclusion that the cat was out of the bag.” The initial mortality rates in China were somewhere between “5-10%,” Redfield [told Gupta.] “I’d probably be cryin’ too,” he added.
Fauci agreed that Chinese duplicity set back the effort to prepare for a disease that would eventually kill nearly three million people around the globe:
“I think it would have been a significant difference,” Fauci [told Gupta.] “I think if we had sent our people into Wuhan and been able to talk to the Chinese scientists in a conversation that might have lasted an hour, you could have gotten so much information right from the get go. They would have told us, don’t believe what you’re reading. This is spread asymptomatically. It spreads highly efficiently and it’s killing people.”
Redfield now believes that Covid-19 originated from a Chinese lab, telling Gupta “Most of us in a lab, when trying to grow a virus, we try to help make it grow better, and better, and better, and better, and better, and better so we can do experiments and figure out about it. That’s the way I put it together.”
Gupta provides important context for Redfield’s theory:
It is a controversial, politically charged theory — one the World Health Organization calls “extremely unlikely,” and there has been no clear evidence to support this “lab leak” theory. Yet, more than a year after the outbreak, a team of WHO scientists inside Wuhan has still been unable to determine the definitive origin of the virus. At this point, it is not clear they ever will.
