Robert Redfield, the former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) when the pandemic erupted, has accused American and British intelligence agencies of orchestrating a clandestine campaign to shut down concerns over a possible laboratory leak in China.

In an exclusive interview with the Daily Mail, the world-renowned virologist says he is now ‘100 per cent’ convinced that Covid-19 was the result of scientists becoming infected while carrying out high-risk experiments to boost the infectivity of bat viruses amid low biosecurity in laboratories in the city of Wuhan.

He believes that Anthony Fauci, former chief medical advisor to President Biden, worked with the heads of US and UK research funding bodies to push a now-debunked theory of natural transmission from animals on sale in the Wuhan wet market to humans.

The purpose, he claims, was to cover up their support for controversial ‘gain-of-function’ research, which was banned in the US between 2014-2017. Any dissenting scientists were labelled as conspiracy theorists.

Redfield also fears security services secretly ‘pulled a lot of the strings’ to protect their agents inside China’s military-linked laboratories, pointing to Fauci’s ties with intelligence since 2004 while running the $38billion US biosecurity programme.

‘The role of the intelligence community is much deeper than meets the eye. It was so effective. I think it was not just the Americans – the British had to be involved too.

‘Intelligence agencies spent a lot of time and energy infiltrating Chinese research programmes, including military programmes, and they were trying to protect their assets as far as possible so did not want any investigations into that [Wuhan] laboratory.

Chinese workers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where scientists are said to have become infected with Covid and spread the virus around the city in 2019

‘The more scrutiny of the laboratory, especially by the Chinese leadership, the higher the risk. I don’t know all the answers, but the bottom line is that this does not smell right.’

In a remarkable four-hour interview, Redfield, the infectious disease expert who spent two decades serving as a scientist in the military…

Called Dr Fauci ‘a father of the virus’ for his long-standing promotion of gain-of-function research (in which an organism’s genes are altered to boost infectivity or other characteristics supposedly to help better understand future outbreaks) despite deep concern from other experts over the dangers.Said he believes the lab leak occurred between mid-August and September 2019, when scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) became infected and then spread the virus around the city.Argues China’s leaders covered up the outbreak from mid-September, when their military took full control of WIV – and on the same day the lab took virus databases offline and ordered a new ventilation system.Suspects the October 2019 Military World Games, when thousands of athletes converged on Wuhan, played a significant role in spreading the disease worldwide.Reveals he received fake anthrax and death threats after saying he suspected a possible lab leak – including from a leading US scientist who told him to 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 himself.Now calls for misconduct investigations into what he says was Fauci’s cabal of international scientists who branded backers of the lab leak idea as conspiracy theorists, despite evidence emerging that several privately held similar concerns.

These are explosive claims by Redfield, 73, a prominent Aids researcher before he became the first virologist to lead the CDC, with its network of domestic and international offices, including one in China.

We met at his hillside home in Baltimore, filled with colourful art painted by his mother-in-law. He and his wife Joy, a former nurse, met while delivering babies. He is friendly and open, gently poking fun at having a Brit visiting when one of his six children calls to discuss a sick friend.

Yet his bold claims have huge global implications – especially given the hostility faced by the handful of scientists and journalists who argued from the start of the pandemic that the outbreak of a new coronavirus in a city far from the habitat of infected bats, and home to a secretive Chinese laboratory specialising in bat viruses, meant a lab leak origin could not be discounted.

The Mail on Sunday newspaper was the first publication worldwide to raise questions over Covid origins during the pandemic’s first months. The paper then broke a string of important exclusives unravelling this saga, including revelations of US funding for Wuhan’s bat virus research. One article that I wrote in January 2021 was cited in Congress in 2023 as the first to ‘lay out the strong case for a lab leak’.

Redfield told me he had seen most of the US intelligence on Covid’s origins before leaving the CDC in 2021. He expects the Trump administration to declassify much of it over the coming months.

‘I suspect all the intelligence agencies will – like the CIA – have to re-evaluate their analysis on Covid and will be unanimous in their conclusions. I think they’ll all come out and say critical analysis of the intelligence data concludes it came from the lab.’

He believes there is ‘not even one per cent chance’ that Sars-CoV-2 – the virus that causes Covid-19 – crossed into humans naturally from animals, a process known as zoonotic spillover. ‘This is just not a credible argument now, although there will always be some people who cling to their myth, like all those people in Europe who thought the world was flat even after Columbus came back.’

Infectious diseases expert Robert Redfield has accused US and UK intelligence agencies of orchestrating a clandestine campaign to shut down concerns over a possible laboratory leak

Redfield took on the CDC job in 2018 fearing he might face a respiratory virus pandemic. He thought it would come from bird flu, not a coronavirus.

‘I still believe we will face a bird flu pandemic – and it will be catastrophic, with far greater fatalities since the world has not learned sufficiently from Covid.’

He was a central player in the pandemic from the start. He first heard about a strange new respiratory disease in Wuhan from CDC staff in China on New Year’s Eve 2019, while enjoying a family gathering. He convened an immediate online meeting the next day with key members of the National Security Council.

During an initial flurry of conversations with George Gao, his public health counterpart in Beijing, he was surprised to be told to formally request sending in a US team to help tackle the unfolding public health disaster in Wuhan.

‘Normally we’d just do it – we worked often together. [George] said, “I can’t invite you in, but I’d like you to come help me”,’ said Redfield. ‘I am sure that [China’s president] Xi Jinping was involved. George told me he had to have approval from his Ministry of Health.’

A few days later, Redfield sat with Donald Trump in the White House after persuading the President to call Xi Jinping in a desperate – but rebuffed – bid to get his team of waiting CDC experts into the central Chinese city. Yet Redfield says he was reassured by talk at the time of a ‘Sars-like virus’, since an earlier Sars (severe acute respiratory syndrome) outbreak – which began in 2002 after a bat disease spilled over to humans through civet cats (eaten with shredded snake and chrysanthemum petals in a popular Chinese regional soup) – showed the virus spread inefficiently among humans. It 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁ed fewer than 800 people worldwide.

Now he wonders if even the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) naming of the new virus as ‘Sars-CoV-2’ was part of a concerted bid to divert attention from the Wuhan laboratory, since ‘if you thought this was Sars-like, then you can buy the spillover concept.

Redfield says the two diseases are very different, despite molecular similarities.

Sars viruses struggle to infect humans, but those infected show clear symptoms, while Covid ‘was immediately one of the most infectious viruses known to mankind and largely asymptomatic’. Studies have shown that a significant proportion of people infected with the virus do not display symptoms or fall sick, especially younger people. ‘Covid is nothing like Sars in how it interacts with humans. The scientific community misled the whole public health community – they should never have called it Sars-like,’ he said. ‘But maybe they wanted to build a certain story.’

China’s George Gao, a Harvard and Oxford-trained virologist and immunologist with expertise on coronaviruses, initially told Redfield the first cases had all come from Wuhan’s wet market, which had been shut down. Redfield suggested casting the net wider across the city to check for other cases.

‘Two days later he called me back and was quite distraught and clearly upset – he said, “Bob, we have hundreds and hundreds of cases and it’s nothing to do with the wet market”.’

Gao officially confirmed the market was a spreader of the virus, not the source, in a statement in May 2020 – yet even today, those pushing the spillover theory still pump out claims pointing the finger at animals on sale there.

‘The wet market was a roost, a red herring,’ Redfield said. ‘This is what bothers me: China’s CDC director knew it did not come from the market in January 2020 – but that did not stop Fauci and all those others from pushing a scenario that it came from there.’

Redfield suspected a lab leak from the start, so during discussions with the White House task force he frequently clashed with Dr Fauci, the hugely influential director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the world’s biggest biomedical research agency, for almost four decades.

Yet Redfield assumed that both theories – lab leak vs zoonotic spillover – would be tested with robust and transparent debate until one was proved correct by weight of evidence in the standard scientific style.

Security personnel keep watch outside Wuhan Institute of Virology during a visit by the World Health Organization in 2021, as part of an investigation into the origins of the virus

So, he was furious to discover 18 months later – following Freedom of Information disclosures – that Fauci had called ‘in total confidence’ a group of prominent scientists to take part in a teleconference on February 1, 2020 after he was sent an article in Science magazine about Wuhan’s sampling of bat viruses and gain-of-function work to boost infectivity of bat viruses.

This resulted in pushing statements into influential journals dismissing the plausibility of a lab leak and branding dissenters such as Redfield ‘conspiracy theorists’.

The strategy proved highly effective at stifling debate – aided by supine journalists, patsy medical journals and the Beijing dictatorship’s blocking of investigations.

Alongside Fauci, the other two core figures were Sir Jeremy Farrar, now the WHO’s chief scientist but who was then boss of the London-based Wellcome Trust (Europe’s biggest medical research charity), whose chair was Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, former director general of MI5 and Francis Collins, then director of NIH.

Lord Vallance, then the UK government’s chief scientific adviser, also joined that initial key teleconference that determined their seemingly duplicitous approach.

Redfield, a devout Catholic who combines his religious faith with a profound belief in the power of science and was inspired by parents who worked as researchers at NIH, was dismayed to discover the real Covid conspiracy taking place at the highest echelons.

‘I was very angry – it was wilful to exclude me,’ he said. ‘I was the premier public health leader in the world and a virologist. My friendship with Fauci is now strained.’

Redfield later learned it had been decided in advance to settle on just a single view on the origin of Covid. They knew he would not change his mind – and that he was immune to any funding offers or pressures that might be offered to win his support.

‘Some others changed their view overnight in public. I don’t think these people have a moral centre. They betrayed science, which they say they held sacrosanct. They demonstrated extreme weakness of character, and they misled the world.’

The teleconference led to publication of a hugely influential commentary in Nature Medicine in March 2020, in which five prominent scientists concluded they did not believe ‘any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible’.

This article was cited by Dr Fauci in the White House and singled out to me by Farrar during my own journalistic enquiries as ‘the most important research’ on the pandemic origins.

It has emerged however that Farrar helped edit the commentary after the teleconference call, while the identified authors privately talked of pressure from ‘higher ups’ to squash lab leak concerns.

Yet even as they were putting their names to it, one author told three others on the messaging app Slack that a lab link was ‘so friggin’ likely’.

Farrar himself highlighted ‘Wild West’ biosecurity in Wuhan to NIH director Francis Collins.

A Fauci aide also talked about learning from a colleague how to ‘make emails disappear’ and sending ‘stuff to Tony’ on private email to avoid freedom of information requests.

Fauci told a House of Representatives inquiry last year that while he kept an open mind on the issue of Covid origins, evidence pointed toward the virus spilling over naturally. He claimed it was ‘molecularly impossible’ for US taxpayer-funded experiments in Wuhan to have produced the pandemic-causing virus but added: ‘I’ve also been very, very clear, and said multiple times, that I don’t think the concept of there being a lab [leak] is inherently a conspiracy theory,’ he said. He denied ever using a private email address to discuss government business.

Farrar, along with two other Wellcome Trust officials, was among the 27 scientists who signed a notorious letter in The Lancet, also in March 2020, praising Chinese experts for ‘rapid, open, and transparent sharing of data’ and condemning ‘conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin’.

It was later found to have been organised days after that teleconference call by Peter Daszak, a British zoologist whose US-based EcoHealth Alliance had channelled US taxpayer dollars to Wuhan Institute of Virology and who was closely involved with its bat virus research. It was barred last year from receiving federal funding after claims that it misrepresented the risks of research in Wuhan.

Little wonder Redfield was left so infuriated by this group’s actions. ‘They classified people like me as conspirators by saying there is no evidence the virus came from a lab. But there were two hypotheses. And five years later there is absolutely no data that supports spillover and plenty of data that supports lab leak.’

His certainty comes from the failure of those backing the zoonotic spillover argument to find a species that transmitted the disease from bats to humans, despite an intensive search by Chinese authorities with testing of samples from at least 80,000 animals. Yet it took only a few months to track down the culprit in the earlier Sars outbreak.

This contrasts, he argues, with considerable evidence backing the lab leak theory.

It includes the suspicious events detected in Wuhan in September 2019, with US intelligence suggesting WIV scientists fell ill with a respiratory disease around that time; heavy traffic detected later that month to hospitals; the city being shut down for the Military World Games in October with subsequent claims of competitors falling sick.

A report by The Mail on Sunday’s Glen Owen in April 2020, showing a broken seal on a fridge door in the Wuhan lab

He points also to gain-of-function research on bat diseases in Wuhan and how scientists at WIV had published papers showing they had boosted the infectivity of mutant bat viruses in humanised mice.

Such experiments were performed supposedly to help understand the evolution of diseases and protect against future outbreaks. But critics say they are often vanity projects for scientists that weaken, rather than enhance, biosecurity.

Redfield also highlights the unusual features of Sars-CoV-2 that made it so good at human transmission such as its ‘furin cleavage site’. This allowed it to bind effectively to cells in many human tissues yet is not found on other similar coronaviruses.

When Redfield discovered this from US intelligence early in the pandemic, he told top government figures this was ‘the smoking gun’ showing the virus had been engineered, possibly in gain-of-function experiments.

This suspicion was strengthened when he learned later how the virus had been constructed using biological building blocks favourable to humans, not to bats. ‘Seeing that, it was case closed,’ he told me.

Then came the stunning discovery that WIV, EcoHealth Alliance and Ralph Baric, a gain-of-function pioneer from University of North Carolina, had sought US defence agency funding to insert this defining feature into bat viruses in 2018 – just one year before the virus emerged in Wuhan.

Their bid was rejected as too risky – yet Shi Zhengli, China’s infamous ‘Batwoman’ expert who was based at WIV, refused to answer last year when asked if she had pushed on with such experiments. The issue had ‘nothing to do with the origin’ of Covid, she insisted.

Redfield said US virologists at government labs had detected signs of other significant genetic manipulations, altering a bat virus to react differently with humans. These include blocking the interferon response elements – complex reactions that occur when a body detects viral infection – so many infected people do not fall ill or show symptoms, another unusual property for a coronavirus.

‘One final thing: how come Covid-19 can no longer infect bats when it’s so efficient at infecting humans? This never happened with Sars and seems a pretty telling point to me.’

He speculates that scientists at Wuhan working with the virus may have been trying to create a universal carrier for vaccines that could be transmitted through aerosol droplets for use in both civilian and military populations.

‘It would have been great to make a universal vaccine that could be used for every antigen [proteins on viruses/bacteria etc, triggering an immune system response] you want. There was just one problem: the vector they used to develop it was not contained and caused the worst global pandemic we’ve seen in over 100 years.’

Redfield fears the pandemic did huge damage to trust in his beloved science. Now he hopes Trump’s pressure on Beijing might convince China’s leader Xi to come clean on Covid’s origins. But ultimately he believes the US shares culpability after funding gain-of-function research in Wuhan even after it was banned domestically.

He disapproves of Joe Biden giving Fauci a pre-emptive pardon against any offences that might have been committed in his public roles from 2014 – coincidentally, the same year the US ban on gain-of-function research came into force and also the start date for a significant National Institutes of Health grant to Wuhan.

There is currently no evidence that Fauci committed any offences during his time as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the NIH.

Yet Redfield does not want to see Fauci end up in prison. ‘I think he did what he thought was best but was polluted by his own ego and ambition. He really believed he is science and whatever he says is science.

‘He probably knew he was deceiving people but thought it was for the greater good to protect science.

‘Yet he hurt science more than anybody in the past century with his actions. As a leading advocate of gain-of-function research, he is a father of this virus.’

Some may consider it hyperbolic, but Redfield compares Fauci with J. Robert Oppenheimer, the brilliant physicist known as the ‘father of the atomic bomb’ for his role in overseeing the development of the first nuclear weapons, who came to regret the destructive forces he had unleashed.

‘Fauci must deal with the same issue as Oppenheimer: he used science that maybe he thought was for a greater good that ended up 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁ing hundreds of thousands of people. And will continue to 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 millions more because this virus is with us until the end of time.’

Battle to uncover the truth

The Mail has approached Dr Fauci, Dr Collins, Lord Vallance, Dame Eliza Mannigham-Buller and EcoHealth Alliance for comment.

The WHO, where Sir Jeremy Farrar is now chief scientist, says its position has not changed on the debate over Covid origins: ‘WHO has always and consistently stated that to advance knowledge on the origin of SARS-CoV-2 we needed and still need studies – and WHO continues to call on China to share all information it has on the origins of Covid-19, so that all hypotheses can be investigated.’

Dr Fauci has previously insisted that he was ‘pro-active’ in making sure that the Chinese lab leak hypothesis was probed and that claims he used grant money to influence scientists on the issue were ‘preposterous’. He has strongly denied suppressing the lab leak theory, telling a US House of Representatives panel last June that he never influenced research on the origins of the virus.

An adviser to seven US presidents and holder of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the US, for his pioneering work on HIV/Aids, Dr Fauci attracted controversy as the face of America’s response to the pandemic, leading to harassment of his family, death threats and political hostility, although his security protection was revoked last month by President Donald Trump. He has been praised by medical leaders for his commitment to evidence-based science.

Dr Collins told a Congressional inquiry last year that it was not a conspiracy theory to suggest that a lab leak might have sparked the pandemic, adding that the issue remained ‘unsettled science’. Three years earlier, he told Fox News he was sorry the lab leak theory had become such a ‘distraction’ since most scientists, including himself, thought natural transmission from bats ‘far more likely’.

Lord Vallance told a House of Commons committee in May 2023 that he believed Sars-CoV-2 was ‘most likely’ to have spilled over naturally from bats. He added that he believed gain-of-function research to be ‘incredibly important’ for science.