Redfield on Risk: Gain-of-Function, Bird Flu, and the Next Pandemic

The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are solely those of the individuals participating in the podcast. This podcast also contains subject matter which may not be suitable for everyone. Listener discretion is advised. This episode is brought to you by Angel Studios, home of the documentary Thank You, Dr. Fauci. Head over to angel.com to watch and learn more about this story. I have lots of patients with long COVID that I'm taking care of. And if you were to go back several years, almost all my patients were referred to me from psychiatry because the medical community didn't believe these individuals had illness. They believed it was all psychosomatic. And I tell the story of the one patient, Joy, who I told her that she was the sickest person I'd ever seen with cognitive dysfunction from long COVID. She was a very successful businesswoman. and she broke out in tears and it was very awkward. And I had her and her friend leave and come back and see me the following week. And when they came back the following week, I started by telling Joy, apologizing for telling her the truth, that she was the sickest person I'd ever seen because Joy had such severe cognitive dysfunction she could only speak in two to five word phrases. She couldn't remember the next words and then she'd have to stop, two to three words, stop, two to three words, stop. It was really quite complicated. And Joy said, when I told her, when she came back, she said, you know, Dr. Redfield, when you told me I was the sickest person you'd ever seen, I didn't cry because you told me I was the sickest person you'd ever seen for cognitive dysfunction from COVID. I cried because you're the first doctor that acknowledged I was sick. That moment is not about controversy. It's about a doctor seeing a patient's reality and how long it can take for medicine to catch up to what people are already living through. Dr. Robert Redfield spent decades inside public health as a clinician, as the CDC director. In this conversation, he looks back at what we learned from the pandemic, what we still don't know, and which risks still deserve our real attention. Episode 8, Redfield on Risk. So probably one of the big transitions in the last year, two years, is a growing recognition and acceptance of long COVID as a clinical entity in which people are quite debilitated. The second that goes parallel with that is, I think, a growing recognition that the mRNA vaccines are associated with vaccine injury. And I have a number of patients now whose lives have been pretty much turned upside down because of vaccine injury from the mRNA vaccines. So I think those are two things that are pretty important. The third, I think, and your documentary was helpful in this regard, I do think there's just a growing consensus now that this, you know, this pandemic actually started in a Wuhan lab. It was a consequence of gain-of-function research. I think it's really a minority of individuals that actually still hold on to the sort of the Fauci theory that it came from the wet market. What has it been like from the political standpoint? There's been an upheaval, you know, HHS, NIH, everything underneath NIH. I know that a lot of these people are by extension colleagues and I don't want to drag you into anything that's overtly political but what do you think the obstacles have been in reform that is sometimes was a stump speech but now it's more of a something that that is more complicated than it appears specifically with gain-of-function research There's a quote unquote ban, but actually ratcheting down this research and stopping it is not as simple as it seems. Yeah, well, first, you know, be very clear. And I've said this publicly, I have a lot of confidence in Kennedy. I think he's going to be the most consequential health secretary that our nation's ever had. I don't think, you know, the media and the public really give him a fair shot. But I think he's made some major impact already with the processed foods and now most recently flipping, you know, the food pyramid to sort of common sense where putting some emphasis on protein and less emphasis on sugar. I think he's bringing honesty and transparency to vaccine policy in the United States, even though, again, he doesn't get a fair shake on it, but he's really doing the right thing, clearly getting the COVID vaccines back where they belong for those of us over 65 and not recommending them for people under the age of 50. I think those are appropriate recommendations, even though the American Academy of Pediatrics and OBGYN have all gone aggressively against them. I think Kennedy is really looking at what the data really shows as opposed to the emotion of holding on to what people previously recommended. A lot of confidence in Jay Bhattacharya, who's the head of NIH. he's got his hands full as he tries to relook at how to position NIH as a national institutes of health as opposed to you know a national institutes of disease and you know Marty McCary at FDA a lot of confidence in him too as he tries to maybe be a little more aggressive in relooking at the safety profile for example of the mRNA vaccines I'm of the point of view there's enough unknown with the mRNA vaccines right now that I you know I think the vaccines in general need to be for the over age 65 vulnerable population. And in that regard, I prefer the protein vaccine over the mRNA vaccine because of all the vaccine injuries that I've been seeing with the mRNA vaccines and the uncertainties of the potential other negative consequences. I don't use the mRNA vaccines. And if I was predicting over the next year, there'll probably be more critical review of those vaccines from a vaccine injury safety perspective. So on gain-of-function research, you know, clearly they've banned the gain-of-function research, but the reality is it's still going on in many labs throughout the United States and around the world. I do think we have to be much more aggressive in our approach to limiting it. And I do think our country has to be more aggressive in having consequences on universities and countries that want to continue to do gain and function research, particularly with maybe some economic consequences if you want to continue to do this kind of research. Because I do think, you know, I just recently came out with my book called Redfield's Warning. And one of the big points of that book is my high concern that we're at high risk for a bird flu pandemic. And I do think that pandemic is likely to come from, again, once again, unfortunately, like COVID, it's more likely to come from the lab than from nature. You know, there's this interesting thing that we didn't have time to include, but the way in which gain-of-function viruses research is sometimes targets livestock. And we saw in Spain an instance where another very bizarre story was told for what was most likely a lab leak that occurred. Yeah, I think the agricultural concerns are real. You know, this is not something limited to human disease when it comes to gain and function research. So I do think that there's obviously a risk in the agricultural field, both in animal concerns, but also in agricultural plant concerns, where there can be things that are done in agriculture that can have significant impact ultimately on our agricultural economy, also on the potential bounce back into human disease. I just think it's a symptom of high degree of scientific arrogance for us to intentionally be trying to make pathogens more pathogenic for human disease or for, say, agricultural. I think it's a mistake. Obviously, targeting an adversary's food chain would be highly disruptive and can be weaponized, and I'm sure in the Cold War, both America and Russia targeted each other's food chain through these type of blights and other things that would be technically lab-borne. There was an interesting connection I made, and maybe it's because I'm a wacky documentary filmmaker and I tend to be very cynical, but in our movie, we talked about the risk of bird flu. And shortly after the movie came out, there was a large outbreak of bird flu in chickens. And it was highly disruptive, and it led to pretty much the economy for poultry crashing and becoming completely inflated. And what I understand about the response to that was the inoculation of a lot of the chickens and hens in America with an mRNA vaccine. So did you make any connection there? I mean, I've asked others about this, but do you think that that was suspicious in any way? Well, I think it was a big mistake. I disagree with ag and their approach to trying to curtail bird flu, particularly in turkeys and chickens. I think the biggest risk that we have in terms of bird flu and human disease is the evolution, particularly of four amino acids, so that the binding domain changes to be able to bind to the human receptor. And when that happens, we're going to have a global pandemic in humans. And it's going to be very complicated. And I talk about that in my new book. One of the ways to, in my view, facilitate that evolution is to put immunological pressure on the virus like they're doing right now by vaccinating. These vaccines are not going to be effective sterilizing vaccines in the population. All they're going to do is drive evolution, drive evolution. So I'm not an advocate. I think it's a poorly thought out policy. I'm much more of an advocate for developing primary antivirals, drugs that can work and prevent the flu virus from being able to replicate, either in animals or humans. I think the idea of developing vaccines, flu vaccines are very poor vaccines. They don't work very well. Those of you who are living through the flu epidemic right now in the United States, and most of us have been vaccinated, you know, probably the most common thing for a person who's been vaccinated with the flu vaccine is that during the year they get flu. They just don't work. On a good year, it's 50%. This year, the vaccine's probably working 25% of the time. But antivirals, they really work. and that's where my big push is in my book, Redfield's Warning, is for us to get much more serious about antiviral drug development and get those drugs developed and get them on the shelf so if and when we need them, we have them. You know, there's two different things that create a fertile ground to reflect on. So one is you mentioned the flu shot being a sort of a problematic product product, and it is very much a product every year, and it drives a lot of revenue, but it doesn't stop the flu. Do you believe that over the years, the flu shot has driven evolution for the flu and just perpetuated stronger strains of the flu since it doesn't eliminate it? Well, I think it definitely drives evolution, okay? And I don't think it's the answer. This is why when the Biden administration decided to give $750 million to Moderna to develop a bird flu vaccine as a countermeasure, I thought it was a big mistake. Now, the Trump administration's pulled that money back, but I still haven't seen the aggressive, you know, Operation Warp Speed type approach for antiviral drug development that I'd like to see. And I think that's really where we really need to go Flu vaccines notoriously don work well And I think it one of the reasons the American public is somewhat skeptical about vaccines because they say I get the flu vaccine and what happens? I get flu. They're just not very good vaccines. We haven't developed good flu vaccines. And I think probably it's unlikely that we will develop. It's a pathogen that is not, you know, I think is susceptible to preventive vaccines, it's much more likely that we'll develop effective chemoprophylaxis, where we could get a medication, antiviral medication that you could take once a month, you know, for three months or six months during flu seasons and prevent yourself from getting flu. I think that's the more prudent approach towards preventing flu. And when it comes to bird flu, I think developing antiviral drugs that can treat bird flu and then potentially developing drugs that may have a role as a chemoprophylactic drug, I think is a much more prudent way for us to go. What do you think drove the sort of evangelical approach to vaccines? I consider myself, just to be clear, I believe in money and I'm a capitalist and I believe in entrepreneurship and that it can drive innovation. But in medicine, it becomes frightening when profit drivers outweigh common sense solutions and innovation and things like you said, antivirals, antibiotics. I mean, again, excuse me for my ignorance here, but I think you know what I'm referring to. A, how did we get so far off track in research? and B, if we had applied some of the common sense sort of ideas in the beginning of COVID and doctors had been free to experiment with even off-the-shelf things that were, you know, helping to stop the spread of the virus in an individual early, do you think we could have saved more lives than, say, Operation Warp Speed did? Well, I think it's an important thing, a couple of things. I think the development of the vaccines with Operation Warp Speed was a very successful program scientifically. And from the point of view of getting the private sector to be able to make, ultimately, there were six companies that were selected and five of them succeeded in developing a vaccine in less than a year. That was an enormous success. Where the real failure in Operation Warp Speed was, was how that success was applied. In other words, there was, I think the American public was largely misled. in one sense, this really wasn't a vaccine in that it didn't prevent infection, modified disease, so that if you were at high risk for bad outcome, that is you were over 65, 75, 85, and you were vaccinated, you were less likely to die or be hospitalized. That's what the vaccine did. It didn't prevent infection. And so the vaccine really never should have been mandated, and it should have never been recommended for individuals that weren't vulnerable for a bad outcome. And yet, unfortunately, and I left office really within six weeks of the vaccine being approved, the Biden administration very rapidly developed policies for the use of these vaccines, which were really counter to what they said publicly before, Biden said he would never mandate the COVID vaccine. And yet one of the first things he did, along with his advisors, was mandate the COVID vaccine, which was a big public health mistake. And we're still paying a huge price for it. It will take a long time to rebuild public trust around vaccines because of that mistake. I do believe if we had developed, and we're learning that those vaccines are not all positive. For example, the J&J vaccine and the AstraZeneca vaccine, both of which came up through the pipeline, both have now been no longer sold because of the side effects that they were associated with, particularly with blood clots. I do believe you're going to find the mRNA vaccines also are going to undergo an enormous amount of scrutiny because of vaccine injury. And in my own view, will likely be black boxed, if not eventually terminated from the marketplace. And of course, the protein vaccine by Novavax, I think, is still a solid vaccine for individuals that are at high risk for bad outcome. That is those of us over 65. That's the vaccine that I use and that I recommend. I don't recommend the mRNA vaccines anymore. And I do think a lot of it, unfortunately, grounded in an attitude that certain people had, you know, some of them, I think you did a documentary about one of them, is that they knew better than you did about what was right for your health. I know when CDC in the spring of in 2021, they stopped recording people that were vaccinated that ended up getting reinfected. And one of the reasons they did that is they didn't want any data that would make people think these vaccines didn't work. The reality is the vaccines didn't work. Most people after three or four months, five months, six months max, were susceptible to reinfection. So there was a really concentrated effort to, in my view, mislead the American public into the point of view that the vaccines were the answer. And they really weren't. And unfortunately, we're still in that mindset. I'm trying to get that mindset changed a little so people realize that the real answer is antiviral drug development. And that's where the real answer is. We had one of the most successful vaccine programs in the history of the world with Operation Warp Speed for the United States. And yet, despite that program, 1.2 million people died. So it should tell you that the vaccines aren't the answer in terms of being the countermeasure that we need to prioritize and invest our energy in. I'm very worried about bird flu. When it does change those amino acids, and it may do by nature. It's much more likely it's done in the laboratory. Those viruses have already been created. They're in freezers. If that virus was to get into the circulation, then it would very rapidly be pandemic among humans. Bird flu has a much higher mortality rate than COVID. If you look at the 800 cases or so that have happened in Southeast Asia over the last decade, it's had over a 50% mortality. it's a bad disease. I think what we really do need to have is a very good supply of various, not just one, but I'd like to have 5, 10, 15, 20 powerful antivirals that could work against bird flu so we don't have to worry about it causing the mortality morbidity that it's predisposed to cause. reflecting on the idea of what this last year has been like you've written a book tell me about um the book and being ready to tell your story obviously you were brave enough to tell me many things that were extremely impactful in the documentary what's been the response to your book and and um how has it helped frame those years very subtle title you know understated redfield warning. You know, it's been out for about a month. I've gotten pretty good reviews so far. I still don't really know how it's selling, but people are very interested in it. But the purpose of the book really and the warning, several warnings in the book that I'm trying to get the American public aware of. First and foremost is the threat of biosecurity. I argue that biosecurity is probably the greatest national security threat that our nation has, and that we ought to develop a response to it proportional to the threat, which we currently don't have. And I kind of draw the analogies with the Defense Department and how we have built a Defense Department for the traditional threat that we need to have a very similar type approach towards the biosecurity threat. And that means engaging contractors, civilian contractors in and antiviral drug development, vaccine development, diagnostics, countermeasures, medical devices, have that stuff all developed, similar to what we have with the Army, Navy, and Air Force, and missiles, and helicopters, and that kind of thing. The other threat that I try to make people aware of is the bird flu pandemic, which I think is coming. And the third threat that I try to give people the warning is that we can't ever have an effective public health system and a public health response to a threat if we don't have public trust and that we lost public trust during the COVID pandemic. And we've got to begin to rebuild that trust in the public health structure of our country. So those are kind of the warnings that I try to discuss in the book. The book's an honest book. It talks about what we got right, what we got wrong. I do think one of the first steps to rebuilding public trust is to be honest about what you got wrong. You know, call it the way it is. Clearly, the vaccine mandate was a huge mistake. Clearly, closing the public schools was a huge mistake. Clearly, shutting down the economy was a huge mistake. Clearly, denying the importance of natural immunity was a huge mistake. Putting all your eggs in this idea of herd immunity was a huge mistake. First, the whole public health response that we had that was based on COVID not being very infectious and very limited human-to-human transmission was a huge mistake. So I kind of go through a lot of the mistakes, so hopefully people will see them. You know, I just wish all my colleagues would admit the mistakes that they were part of making, because I think it would go a long way to help accelerating the rebuilding of public trust. And I think in every conversation I've had with you that, you know, you do carry a sense of very grounded humility about, you know, your own mistakes in the book. Do you touch on personally things that you reflect on that you believe you've earned on? I think it's right there. Most people who've read the book, you know, you know, coming back and just say they find it, you know, an honest book, a humble book. Yeah, I don't shy away from taking responsibility for mistakes. And what are a couple of those that you want the public to know? The very first one, you know, the fact that, and I wasn't the only one responsible for this, but I was part of it, is, you know, calling this virus SARS-like. It wasn't SARS-like. SARS is a coronavirus that has very difficult time transmitting human to human. It came in in 2002, 2003, from a bat to a civet cat to humans. And now we sit here over 20 years later, there's been less than 10,000 cases in the world. SARS never learned how to go human to human efficiently, even to this day. The other thing about SARS was when you got SARS, there was really no such thing as asymptomatic infection. And so when we decided this was SARS-like, two things happened. And the head of CDC, China, affirmed to me when I talked to him in the first week of January, he didn't think there was any human-to-human transmission. And he said there was no asymptomatic infection. Both of those were wrong. Both of those, though, I concluded were operational. So we developed our public policy around that, that we looked for symptomatic sick people, and then we would isolate around them. Well, when the Diamond Princess happened in the middle of February and the Japanese government invited us to help them, I learned within no time that over half the people on the Diamond Princess were infected with COVID, and a majority of them were totally asymptomatic. So our public policy, where we were trying to look for symptomatic illness and then isolate around them, was just flawed. I remember evaluated, I think, about 800 contacts of the first 14 cases in the United States that came in through the middle of February 2020. And of those 800 cases, we had two people we showed were infected with COVID. So we concluded that COVID was like SARS and it wasn very infectious human to human Well you have to ask the question how did we diagnose those people And the way we did it was we took the contacts and we asked them are they sick And if they said they weren't sick, we thanked them and said goodbye to them because we falsely were under the operational belief that there was no asymptomatic infection. In reality, a majority of people infected with COVID are subsymptomatic. And so it was a highly flawed public health response that we had in January, February, March. And we had to really flip it to the idea that what you really had to do is expanded diagnosis, expanded testing. You had to test people to see if they were infected or not. When I originally set up the screening for all the airports for people coming back in the United States, initially from China and then Europe later on, the way we did it is when they hit the airports, we funneled people into a series of airports that they had to go through. And at the airport, we would line them all up and we'd ask them if they were sick. If they weren't sick, we'd send them, we'd admit them to the United States. If they were sick, we'd evaluate them and to include testing for COVID-19. Again, that was a very flawed approach. So I think that was one of the really big early public health mistakes that was made that I know I was very involved in making. So there's an interesting juxtaposition there, because right in January, you believed that it was the data, origin and all that you knew about the research being done at this laboratory, which you quickly learned our support of that laboratory had been through Fauci, that on one hand, many people could look at the way that you operated after that and say, well, shouldn't he have spoken out more? Shouldn't he have stuck his neck out publicly and said what he believed about the virus? But I think that that's sort of a naive approach to being a public health official, which ultimately is a bureaucratic position that hamstrings scientists and doctors because now they're involved in a political situation and they're involved in clearance and they're involved in a lot of things that stop them from speaking honestly to the public. How do you reflect on that? Well, I was pretty aggressive in my own clinical assessment as a clinical virologist in mid-January, just looking at what was happening in Wuhan, meaning this city now had thousands and thousands of infections. I told the story, I don't think you used it in your documentary exactly, but when I talked to my counterpart, George Gao, he told me that he had 27 cases of a new pneumonia that wasn't SARS and wasn't flu that came from the wet market. And I asked him his case definition. And he said, it's people who don't have a respiratory illness, it's not flu and not SARS, that came from the wet market. And I said, well, George, then by definition, everybody came from the wet market. Why are you trying to pin this on the wet market? You need to go away from the wet market and look for people that have similar symptoms and see what's going on in Wuhan. And in a couple of days, he called me back and he said, Bob, we have hundreds and hundreds of cases all through Wuhan, and it has nothing to do with the wet market. So the wet market was a roost that I do believe certain people played into in an aggressive way to turn the attention away from the laboratory. The second thing I did in January, just do a literature search, and I saw that this laboratory in the Wuhan laboratory had published papers back in 2014, 2015, that they had intentionally taught coronaviruses how to infect humanized mice through the ACE2 receptor. So I knew they were doing research on gain and function research to try to get bat coronaviruses to figure out how to infect human tissue. That to me was highly suspect. And when you looked at those papers, they thanked NAID for the funding. So in other words, I knew that it's from 2014, NIH was funding this laboratory to teach coronaviruses how to infect human tissue. So I aggressively expressed my point of view at the White House Task Force, the president, the vice president, other members, that my hypothesis was that this came from a laboratory. Back in January, it wasn't, as you pointed out, It wasn't my role as CDC director to go on NBC News and do that. I did it for the White House Task Force and for our National Security Council and for, obviously, the president and vice president, for them to understand my opinion on where this virus came from. I will say that Fauci was extremely aggressive in countering that opinion and suggesting that it came from natural spillover, which I argued that I was of a different point of view. And I will say one of the reasons I didn't go back in to public health policy with this administration is that I do enjoy the opportunity to tell people what I think. Fortunately, when you are in these jobs where there is this thing, as you pointed out, called clearance, you really do have to work within a chain of command. Now, I was very familiar with the classified data, and I was an advisor to Mike Pompeo and the Secretary of State. on a lot of this classified data. So I became very rapidly even aware of more data that supported my concern, you know, whether it was a cancellation of the military gains or whether it was evidence that this epidemic really started in Wuhan back in August and September. All of that stuff was classified at the time. But as most of it has been declassified, anything I said to you has been declassified since then. So, you know, it's just, you just, you try to do the best. I know that when I did come out after I was no longer CDC director and I was interviewed by Sanjay Gupta on CNN and they asked me what I thought about the origin of the virus. I said, I thought I came from the lab. Sanjay was shocked and, you know, stopped the interview. How, you know, how can you say that? And I said, well, that's what I believe. And the very next morning I got attacked in the newspaper The Baltimore Sun called me a racist, an Asian racist. Other newspapers called me an Asian racist. The state of Maryland passed a resolution, both in the House and Senate, that I was a racist. They suggested that the governor needed to fire me since I was a senior public health advisor for the state of Maryland because I was a racist, all because I expressed a point of view scientifically. But when you're in the administration and within a chain of command, I expressed my assessment to the leadership of this nation very clearly. I don't know if you're obliged to share it in general terms, but there was a recent instance where Fauci attempted to do something it appears he's done to you many times in your career, which is to say, well, if Bob Redfield's on that team, I'm not going to be a part of it. This time it went slightly differently. Can you share anything about that? I would rather not, Jenner. I mean, we're different people. Let's just leave it at that. We're a different field. Tony, I think, has expressed his sadness that he feels somehow I haven't been as supportive of him as he would like. I've just tried to be truthful. Do you think he's been supportive of you in your career and looking back? No, I don't think so. But I don't think it's unique to me. I think Tony has a gene that is highly targeted towards self-support. I would, if the genetic study was done, I'd put my bet on that result being done. I would have loved him to be more supportive of my career at different times. I don't think he was supportive. There might have been a couple times when he even was anti-supportive. So we'll just have to see. But the one thing that happens in life is you do get older. And as you do get older, sometimes even people that have very significant differences learn how to be more effective working together because they were in the arena together at one point in time in their life. there's something that's come up as we kind of wrap up i want to pick your brain about something that's now circulating on i think that there were folks early on who may have thought this they didn't even fit into the narrative which was already being called a conspiracy theory which was that the virus originated uh out of the lab in wuhan and that is uh some data that suggests some isolated outbreaks. And we know about the one in Skohomish, Washington after the military games and some of the nursing homes, which had a rapid spread of what would have been seen most likely as COVID at the time, but it had been before December 31st, early January, when this new virus was coming on your radar. But there's a more troubling outbreak that occurred in Greenspring, Virginia, in a series of nursing homes that were near the military base there. And some of the scientists who were involved in investigating origin are now focusing on whether or not there is a probable basis to look at these outbreaks and do tissue samples and serological sample review, which these samples exist because it was a novel outbreak and it didn't look like the normal viruses that were spreading. And this was in July of 2019. And one of the questions that some of the scientists have asked, hoping to get feedback from you, is at the time you were the director of the CDC and that Fort Detrick had been shut down. And folks are a little curious about whether or not, because there has been some tracing and some The people who were working at Fort Detrick in a program involved with virology and defense were also working at this base near Greenspring. And so there's a theory that although there were a lot of reported problems at Fort Detrick, that the shutdown was a little bit suspiciously timed. And of course, you have proof that Ralph Baric was doing research in North Carolina. And then after the film came out, I had a lot of first responders, emergency room doctors and nurses contact me and say, hey, we were seeing what looked like COVID in August in our emergency room. So do you feel like there's any credence to the idea that while a super spreader or even a false flag could have occurred clandestinely through the Wuhan lab, that theory that it may have actually leaked here and that it was a race to redirect the focus from American soil to Chinese soil? I don't sort of go follow that. I mean, I shut down Fort Detrick for a very specific reason. So one of the things CDC does is we inspect laboratories that were high containment laboratories and making sure that they're adhering to the containment requirements. And we did our inspection in Fort Detrick and there was some defects and we give them a list of defects they have to correct, and then a month later go back and make sure they corrected them all. And we noticed they weren't corrected. And so I said, this wasn't an optional situation. And even though it was difficult for me, because I knew the people, I'd been in the Army for 23 years I made the difficult decision that we weren going to fool around with biocontainment procedures that you didn adhere to then we shutting you down And we shut down Fort Dietrich So it was strictly because of their containment procedures they were doing within their high containment research that was largely in other viral systems, okay? Hemorrhagic fever viruses, et cetera, Ebola, you know, Marburg. I do believe that the military games in October in Wuhan was, in retrospect, probably the initial super spreader event. And it is interesting if you look at what didn't make sense to a lot of people, like why did Iran have such an outbreak? Italy had such an outbreak. Of course, the United States had an outbreak. When you go back, Iran and Italy, for example, and the United States had a significant number of people in the military that went to those military games. And people believe that they probably were more people who got infected there and then brought the virus back home to the community. I'm not aware of, and that was in October, I'm aware of sporadic cases of what in retrospect in my mind was COVID that occurred in late August, early September in Wuhan. but I'm not aware of it outside of Wuhan. So you may have come up across stuff in your own research that never crossed my desk. Well, one of the things that would be just the scientific method would be to, if there was really a sort of a task force and origin declassifying and coming, you know, to the best understanding of how, both from a research standpoint and from whether it was a safety standpoint of it leaking or whether it was potentially an intentional event, would be to dispel some of these things or at least through scientific process, eliminate the potential of that. And for some reason, these samples have not been accessible or tested. Would you support the testing of the samples? Oh, yeah, absolutely. I don't know. Listen, when I recommended strongly, I didn't carry the day on this. I wanted to have our U.S. military and the other military of the world that went to the Wuhan games, I wanted to have them tested back in, you know, December, January. Well, that's a new piece of information, yeah. Because I believed, in retrospect, that probably was the first super spreader event on a global scale. I mean, you know that the military games, it's very suspicious that those military games in Wuhan, the Wuhan government had the games go on, but they didn't allow any spectators to go to the games, which is very unusual. It's like having the Olympics, but not allowing anybody to come and watch. I would say as a man who was in the army for two decades, that it's also suspicious that if intelligence existed, which it did, classified information about the safety profile of the city of Wuhan at that point and a lot of suspicious activity that existed on our servers that maybe was not analyzed, that it's equally problematic that we let our armed forces compete in this event that was highly dangerous and that they ultimately brought the virus back to the United States. It's clear, and you hinted at it in your comment, one of the real things that identified, You know, I had my first meeting with the National Security Council over this on January 2nd. I learned about it December 31st, and I'm with the National Security Council. That's how serious I thought it was, okay? You know, when I got wind of these first 27 cases, I said, this is a problem. What's really clear to me, unfortunately, is there's not real-time intelligence. You said it right. We probably had the intelligence, but no one had analyzed the intelligence. And I suspect a lot of the intelligence related to the Wuhan situation that we're talking about, August, September, October, I bet you a lot of that intelligence really didn't get analyzed in a meaningful way until February, March, April. It's possible that some of the intelligence from July has been analyzed to date because it is potentially too problematic for the message. You may be right. And, you know, this is way beyond my expertise in this space. I am suspect that our intelligence community was more involved in this than meets the eye. and i was always bothered by the cia and their analysis you know i worked with the fbi and the energy department and and i think they got it right i was always bothered by the cia's analysis that they thought this was still more likely from the wet market which clearly was inconceivable that they could have come to that conclusion based on the intelligence information that even i had read right and something inconceivable being issued by an intelligence agency is conceivably a cover-up at that point because they have the sources and the intelligence. I mean, in other words, I had seen enough intelligence to know that their conclusion was non-credible. So, you know, there's a theme that you may have seen in the film about, and very much Fauci's real ascension to bureaucratic power, which he had a stronghold in, but the power structure and sort of taking it out of defense and putting it in an agency that you wouldn't look to regulate for bioweapons research and doing dual-purpose research. But what I think we've learned, many already knew this, but if you look at an individual like Ralph Baric, him being tapped to investigate and research SARS viruses and their potential happened very early. It happened right after the initial SARS outbreak in China. And so this story of creating a pandemic in order to defend against a pandemic was sort of the motto. And we now see that he was working as a source directly for the CIA. And I think that it's such a cautionary tale or a time to reflect heavily on the way in which we defend ourselves as we play God in these scenarios and try to have an edge, but really we're weaponizing something that's very erratic and out of control. And as a result, we likely had a hand in creating a pandemic that was the very thing we were trying to defend against. When you think about it, this is a story that started a lot earlier than we thought. And I want to let you close on that and really in reflecting on how we really have gotten this massively wrong and the peril that we're facing. You know, I have a lot of confidence in Dave Asher. I know you've talked to Dave. I think he has his finger on the pulse of this because he was following this all the way back. This was his area of expertise, weapons of mass destruction. For me, it kind of highlights what was central to the purpose of me writing this book, which was to make people aware that biosecurity, biosecurity, really in my view, is the most important national security threat that our nation has more than Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea. We really need to build not a public infrastructure to deal with the biosecurity threat. We need to build a private sector, public sector partnership like we have with the Defense Department through defense contractors to really position ourselves to be the best prepared with the potential countermeasures that we're going to need, no matter how this occurs. whether it occurs by an evolution of nature, which I think is less likely, or whether it occurs as a consequence of gain-of-function research in laboratories and unintentional accidents, or whether it occurs as a consequence of bioterrorism and intentional. The reality is, independent of how it occurs, we ought to be building a defense against it. I think it's predictable. There's no doubt that many groups have been involved in dual-use research from a defense perspective. But as you point out, I think in your first Thank You, Dr. Fauci documentary, that when individuals are involved in biodefense, it doesn't mean there's not a risk for bio-offense. I do not buy into the hypothesis that some of my colleagues have bought into in order for us to prepare for the threat of these pathogen evolutionary events that may occur that we need to create them. I think that's a flawed logic. And I do think history will show maybe whenever it finally finalizes this, it may be long after my death, that the COVID-19 pandemic was a direct consequence of science. And it did lead to an enormous catastrophic consequence in loss of life, obviously economy, etc. And I did like in your Thank You, Dr. Fauci movie the way you reflected at the end, because I know I have reflected on it because I have his book in my office, Oppenheimer's book, you know, how Oppenheimer must have really felt at the end of his life when he was a man who loved science enormously, the physics of science, for him only to realize that he had been an instrument of using that science. for great human harm. And, you know, I feel the same way about the gain-of-function research. The men and women that were involved in this research, I think probably in their hearts were doing it for what they believed was a good reason. But at the end of the day, they were part of a process that ended up causing great human harm. The failure isn't always missing information. Sometimes, it's failing to see it clearly, quickly, honestly enough to act. Intelligence that shows up too late. Lessons learned after the damage is done. Across this series, the same tension keeps coming up. Speed versus caution. Confidence versus humility. Preparation versus consequence. Science can move us forward. It can also outrun our guardrails. So if there's one thing to carry forward, it's this. When the next crisis comes, watch the opening statements. Track what changes. Notice what never gets answered. Because in stories like this, the truth rarely disappears. It leaks out slowly, through revisions, through emissions, through quiet updates. Most people stop paying attention to. We won't. I'm Payne Lindsey thanks for listening thanks for listening to Leaked a podcast inspired by the documentary Thank You Dr. Fauci if you want to see the full story the interviews, the evidence and more check out the documentary streaming now on Angel Studios visit angel.com Leaked is a production of Tenderfoot Labs produced in partnership with Insight Studios, Angel Studios and Bombadil Productions. Producers on behalf of Insight Studios are Jenna First, Louis Fenton, Scott St. John, and Arnold Rifkin. Executive producers on behalf of Tenderfoot Labs are Donald Albright, Payne Lindsey, and Alex Vespestead. Tenderfoot Labs' lead producer is Tristan Bankston. Editing by Cameron Tagge. Coordinating producers are John Street and Jordan Foxworthy. Artwork by Where Eagles Dare. Music by Danielle First, Kyrie Mateen and Jay Ragsdale mixed by Dayton Cole. For more podcasts like Leaked, search Tenderfoot TV on your favorite podcast app or visit us at tenderfoot.tv. Thanks for listening.