“My position was just tell the American public the truth. There are side effects to vaccines. Tell them the truth and don’t try to package it.”
That was Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control during the administration of Donald Trump. Dr. Redfield recently went on record that the government health bureaucracy tried to quash discussion about the ineffectiveness of Covid vaccines.
“There was such an attempt to not let anybody get any hint that maybe vaccines weren’t foolproof, which, of course, we now know they have significant limitations,” said Redfield, who co-founded the University of Maryland’s Institute of Human Virology and served as the Chief of Infectious Diseases and Vice Chair of Medicine at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.
“I think we should have really confidence and not be afraid to debate the issues that we think are in the public’s interest and just tell the public the truth,” said the former CDC director. This wasn’t the first time Dr. Redfield had been at odds with the government health establishment.
“I’m of the point of view that I still think the most likely etiology of this pathology in Wuhan was from a laboratory, you know, escaped,” Redfield told CNN in 2021. “Other people don’t believe that. That’s fine. Science will eventually figure it out.” After these statements, as Vanity Fair reported, “death threats flooded his inbox,” some from prominent scientists.
“I was threatened and ostracized because I proposed another hypothesis,” Redfield explained. “I expected it from politicians. I didn’t expect it from science.” The people might expect the FBI to investigate death threats against a public official, but reports of any such investigation are hard to find.
In 2021, Joe Biden said he would ask the intelligence community to “redouble their efforts to collect and analyze information that could bring us closer to a definitive conclusion.” The Delaware Democrat ignored a key reality about the pandemic.
The CDC deploys the Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS), a medical CIA, to prevent epidemics from arriving on American soil. The intrepid EIS officers failed to stop the Covid virus from arriving stateside, and their failure, like the death threats against Redfield, has not been subjected to an investigation. In early 2020, EIS veteran Dr. Nancy Messonnier, the sister of Rod Rosenstein, delivered a series of press briefings that faithfully echoed China’s talking points.
Biden medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci headed the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) for nearly 40 years. Dr. Fauci funded the Wuhan Institute of Virology to conduct gain-of-function research that makes viruses more lethal and transmissible. The WIV, in turn, received shipments of deadly pathogens courtesy of Dr. Xiangguo Qiu, the Chinese national who headed the special pathogens unit at Canada’s National Microbiology Lab.
In 2017-2018 alone, Dr. Qiu made at least five trips to the WIV. Despite the record, Dr. Fauci maintained that the virus arose naturally in the wild, a matter of speculation, not science. After more than 50 years in government, Dr. Fauci announced retirement at the end of 2022.
Dr. Fauci’s bio shows no advanced degrees in molecular biology or biochemistry, but he claims to represent science. The former NIAID boss continues to act as though he still runs the place, urging people to follow CDC orders to mask up. In similar style, with mysterious new variants allegedly emerging, Joe Biden announces new vaccines “for everybody,” regardless of what they had done in the past.
Former CDC director Dr. Redfield proclaims that complete immunization is a “false perception,” that vaccines have “significant limitations,” and that vaccine mandates caused a deterioration in public trust.
Dr. Redfield’s comments came in the wake of a decision by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that the government cannot force social media companies to remove content to which they object. A plaintiff in the case was Dr. Jay Battycharya of Stanford University.
With epidemiologists Dr. Martin Kulldorff of Harvard and Dr. Sunetra Gupta of Oxford, Dr. Battycharya was co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, a plea for more human policies on lockdowns, masking and such. Instead of debating these medical scientists, National Institutes of Health boss Dr. Dr. Francis Collins ordered Fauci to organize a “devastating takedown” of the declarations.
“At the height of the pandemic, I found myself smeared for my supposed political views, and my views about Covid policy and epidemiology were removed from the public square on all manner of social networks,” writes Dr. Battycharya, who became an American citizen at age 19. “I could not believe this was happening in the country I so love.”
According to the Stanford professor, the Fifth Circuit decision “isn’t perfect.” The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) “can still work with academics to develop a hit list for government censorship.” And NIAID “can still coordinate devastating takedowns of outside scientists critical of government policy.”
On the other hand, “the federal government can no longer threaten social media companies with destruction if they don’t censor on behalf of the government.” Like Dr. Robert Redfield, the Stanford immunologist has learned a valuable lesson:
“Our government is not immune to the authoritarian impulse. I have learned the hard way that it is only we, the people, who must hold an overreaching government accountable for violating our most sacred rights. Without our vigilance, we will lose them.”