WASHINGTON — The former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Wednesday accused top federal health officials of excluding him from discussions in early 2020 about whether the coronavirus was the result of a laboratory leak, a claim that one of the officials, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, later said it “had nothing to do with reality.”
Three years into the pandemic, the indictment of former CDC director Dr. Robert R. Redfield highlighted the lingering bitterness and partisan divisions surrounding the scientific question of the virus’s origins.
Dr. Redfield, a virologist who headed the CDC during the Trump administration, believes the pandemic was most likely the result of a laboratory leak. He testified Wednesday at the first hearing of the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, which is investigating the origins of a virus that has killed nearly seven million people world.
The hearing produced no new evidence, but plenty of political theatrics, and it made clear how difficult it could be to find conclusive evidence about whether the virus escaped from a laboratory or was transmitted naturally from animals to humans. It’s a question worth answering, said Rep. Ami Bera, D-Calif., a physician serving on the subcommittee who said he was agnostic on the issue.
“Assigning blame will not bring seven million people back,” Bera said in an interview. “But it could prevent another seven million deaths, if we understand what happened.”
Dr. Redfield said the answer would likely come from intelligence agencies, not scientists, and lawmakers from both parties seem to agree. Last week, the Senate passed an invoice that would order the declassification of intelligence related to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a laboratory specializing in coronavirus research in Wuhan, China, where the pandemic began. The Chamber is scheduled to take the measure on Friday.
On the other side of the Capitol complex, the director of national intelligence, Avril D. Haines, told the Senate Intelligence Committee on Wednesday that there was a consensus that the virus that causes covid-19 was not designed as a biological weapon, but rather that intelligence agencies disagreed on whether it was leaked from a laboratory or came from natural exposure to an infected animal. China has destroyed evidence, complicating the search for the cause.
“We’ve been trying to gather additional information, and I think you’re absolutely right that China hasn’t fully cooperated,” Ms. Haines said, responding to a question from Sen. Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida and vice chair of the committee. “And we think that’s a key critical gap that would help us understand what exactly happened.”
In the United States, the idea that the coronavirus emerged from a laboratory was initially dismissed as a conspiracy theory by critics of President Donald J. Trump, who embraced the idea as he tried to blame China for the pandemic. But now he’s getting a second look, partly because the new intelligence has led the Department of Energy to concludewith little confidence, that the pandemic was likely the result of a laboratory accident.
“There is no irrefutable proof to prove a hypothesis of laboratory origin, but the growing body of circumstantial evidence suggests a weapon that is at least hot to the touch,” said another witness at the House hearing, Jamie Metzl, a senior member of Atlantic. Councilman who worked in the Clinton administration and described himself as a Democrat.
A divided congress
The 118th Congress is underway, with Republicans in control of the House and Democrats in the Senate.
In making the case for a laboratory leak, several witnesses focused on a particular characteristic of the virus that causes covid-19. That feature, called a furin cleavage site, helps the virus efficiently infect human cells.
In 2018, the EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit research organization, and several of its partners, including the Wuhan Institute of Virology, sought funding from the Department of Defense to experiment with coronaviruses that could spread in humans. proposalwhich was rejected, consisted of studying furin cleavage sites.
One of the witnesses, Nicholas Wade, who served as science editor for The New York Times in the 1990s and left the news organization in late 2011, told lawmakers that researchers may have already conducted experiments on those who inserted furin sites into coronaviruses.
Mr. Wade questioned the likelihood that evolution would “produce, at the same time and in the same place, a virus of the exact type described” in the groups’ proposal.
EcoHealth said Wednesday that the researchers did not do the experiments before proposing them in part because they “required a substantial budget.”
No evidence has yet emerged to show that the Wuhan lab researchers had any viruses in their collections that could have been altered to produce the virus that causes covid-19. Scientists have said that natural evolutionary processes could easily explain the presence of the furin cleavage site.
While the known close relatives of the coronavirus that emerged in Wuhan are missing a furin cleavage site, many other coronaviruses have the same hallmark, including coronaviruses that cause colds.
Dr. Redfield testified that he was alarmed by the furin cleavage site, which, he said, “totally changes orientation now, so it has a great affinity for human receptors,” transforming its ability to bind to human cells.
But coronaviruses, including Bat coronaviruses discovered in Laos in 2020, can adhere to human cells without a furin cleavage site. Stephen Goldstein, a virologist at the University of Utah, said the furin site affected the route of entry of the virus into cells, but not its ability to bind.
“Everything he said was wrong,” Dr. Goldstein said of Dr. Redfield. “Robert Redfield is either ignorant or lying to Congress.”
Dr. Redfield’s allegation that he was excluded from discussions about the origins of the virus revolves around email exchanges and a phone conversation in early February 2020, a month before the World Health Organization declared a pandemic, in the rush to find out where the new virus had come from. of.
At the time, some scientists said the furin cleavage site made them wonder if the virus was engineered. The emails show that Dr. Jeremy Farrar, a British medical researcher, made a call so the scientists could discuss it. Dr. Fauci, at the time director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Dr. Francis S. Collins, who led the National Institutes of Health, were on the call.
Dr. Redfield said he didn’t find out about the call until much later, when the emails became public. The messages do not refer to or name Dr. Redfield. But he told lawmakers that when he found out about them, he concluded that Dr. Fauci and Dr. Collins had intentionally excluded him because he believed the virus originated in a laboratory.
“They told me they wanted a unique narrative and obviously I had a different point of view,” said Dr. Redfield. He did not specify who made the comment and declined to answer questions after the hearing.
But in an interview, Dr. Fauci said that he and Dr. Collins did not organize the call, which brought together evolutionary biologists, including some who suspected the virus was created in a laboratory. He also said that he did not know what Dr. Redfield’s views were at the time.
“It doesn’t make any sense that he was excluded because he had a different opinion,” Dr. Fauci said. “Half the people on the call felt that way.”
A few days after that call, scientists who suspected a leak at the lab changed their assessments, as they had initially said might happen. After further investigation, they concluded that the genetic evidence was not consistent with a virus that had been deliberately engineered, and then published A study presenting your research.
If there was a single point of agreement at Wednesday’s hearing, it was that politicians should put partisanship aside so an impartial investigation could proceed. But legislators did not always practice what they preached.
The Democrats used part of their time to attack Trump and attack Wade, who wrote a book in 2014, “A Troublesome Inheritance”, which argued that there is a biological basis for the breed. Rep. Raul Ruiz of California, the top Democrat on the subcommittee, called Wade’s ideas “discredited, unscientific and damaging.” Mr. Wade responded that his book was “explicitly anti-racist” and added: “I stress the fact that we are all variations of the same human genome.”
Republicans, in turn, have repeatedly attacked Dr. Fauci, who has become a frequent target for the party. That prompted a warning from Mr. Metzl, who warned lawmakers not to focus on Dr. Fauci as they search for the origins of the pandemic.
“If we make it primarily about Dr. Fauci,” he said, “we will be inappropriately serving the Chinese government a propaganda coup on a silver platter.”
Julian E. Barnes contributed reporting.