The debate over COVID-19’s origins has shifted significantly as bombshell new evidence suggests the virus likely emerged from a laboratory in Wuhan, China, rather than naturally from an animal market — and it now has the backing of a longtime head of the U.S. Center for Disease Control.
Recent declassified intelligence reports have brought new attention to the credibility of a lab leak origin. It was a “conspiracy theory” that was once angrily dismissed by the mainstream media, but it is now gaining acceptance among key officials and agencies.
The Trump administration recently replaced government COVID-19 information websites with a page dedicated to the lab leak theory, signaling a clear position on the pandemic’s origins.
Dr. Robert Redfield, who served as CDC director from 2018 to 2021, has been among the most vocal supporters of the lab leak hypothesis. In a recent Newsmax interview, Redfield stated he was pleased with the White House’s new position.
“I’m glad that they’ve come out clearly, not ambiguously, said that it came from the lab,” Redfield told host Rob Finnerty on Monday.
Redfield faced media attacks for his early support of the theory. He was “ostracized, ridiculed, and called a racist, and received death threats” for acknowledging that evidence for COVID’s origin pointed to a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Indeed, recently declassified documents reveal that U.S. intelligence agencies considered the lab leak plausible much earlier than previously known. A Defense Intelligence Agency assessment dated June 25, 2020 – just months into the pandemic – concluded the virus had likely been engineered in and leaked from the Wuhan facility.
According to documents obtained through a recent Freedom of Information request, the DIA analysis found the virus’s unique makeup was “consistent with the hypothesis” of a “lab-engineered virus” that “escaped.”
James Phillips, former Special Adviser to the UK Prime Minister, confirmed similar conclusions were reached by British intelligence.
“This is precisely the conclusion our team came to at the time, but in direct contradiction to the position the UK science establishment strongly took,” Phillips said.
In recent years, the CIA, FBI, and U.S. Department of Energy have all changed their support to the lab leak theory as the most likely explanation for the pandemic’s origins, though they’ve stopped short of declaring absolute certainty.
Some scientists still maintain that a natural origin remains the most plausible. A virologist at the at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada, Angela Rasmussen, told NPR the evidence for the lab leak theory presented by the White House was “factually incorrect, embellished, or presented in a misleading way.”
Michael Worobey, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona, has also argued that evidence points to “the less flashy hypothesis that bringing live animals infected with pathogens with pandemic potential into the heart of one of the biggest cities in the world was how this pandemic started.”
Five years after the pandemic began, the search for definitive evidence continues.
But with increasingly serious consideration given to the possibility that a cover-up has hidden the origin of one of history’s most deadly pandemics, a conclusion may soon finally be reached by the Trump administration’s top scientists.
In an abundance of caution, Redfield has called for a global moratorium on such pathogens research until an answer is definitively found.
“I think Trump’s going to do that, I’ve been told soon — it can’t be soon enough — and provide leadership… that we shouldn’t be intentionally trying to make pathogens more infectious, more dangerous for humans,” Redfield said.