Robert Redfield – American Conservative Movement

Mandating Covid Shots “One of the Greatest Mistakes”: Former CDC Chief

John-Michael Dumas, The Defender — Sat, 13 Jul 2024 14:05:09 +0000

Former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Robert Redfield confirmed the dangers of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines in a U.S. Senate hearing Thursday, calling them “toxic” and saying they should never have been mandated.

Redfield’s admissions came during a Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs hearing on government oversight of taxpayer-funded high-risk virus research.

The late admission of vaccine injuries underscores the failure of public health agencies and the medical establishment to provide informed consent to the billions of vaccine recipients worldwide.

“It’s important that he is telling the truth now,” vaccine researcher Jessica Rose, Ph.D., told The Defender. “Adverse events were hidden and still are being hidden to prevent injection hesitancy.”

Redfield, who led the CDC from 2018 to 2021, didn’t stop there. He declared biosecurity “our nation’s greatest national security threat,” calling for a halt to gain-of-function research pending further debate.

The hearing, which featured contentious exchanges between senators and witnesses, also touched on controversial topics such as the COVID-19 origins lab-leak theory and allegations that health agencies suppressed data.

mRNA vax ‘should have been open to personal choice’

During the hearing Redfield, who oversaw the CDC during the crucial early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, elaborated on his recent statements about mRNA vaccine safety.

“I do think one of the greatest mistakes that was made, of course, was mandating these vaccines,” Redfield said. “They should have never been mandated. It should have been open to personal choice.”

Redfield went further, admitting that the spike protein produced by mRNA vaccines is “toxic to the body” and triggers “a very strong pro-inflammatory response.”

He noted that in his own medical practice, he doesn’t administer mRNA vaccines, preferring “killed protein vaccines” instead.

Redfield’s statements stand in stark contrast to the CDC’s official stance during his tenure, which strongly promoted mRNA vaccine uptake as safe and effective.

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) pressed Redfield on the issue, highlighting concerning data from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). Johnson presented figures showing over 37,000 deaths reported following COVID-19 vaccination, with 24% occurring within two days of injection.

Redfield acknowledged there was “not appropriate transparency from the beginning about the potential side effects of these vaccines.” He criticized attempts to “underreport any side effects because they argued that would make the public less likely to get vaccinated.”

I truly appreciated Dr. Redfield’s honesty at the hearing today. pic.twitter.com/X06znrxe12

— Senator Ron Johnson (@SenRonJohnson) July 12, 2024

‘FDA should release all of the safety data’

Redfield’s criticism of data withholding extended beyond vaccine side effects. He expressed disappointment in the U.S. Food and Drug Administration‘s (FDA) handling of vaccine safety information.

“The FDA should release all of the safety data they have,” Redfield said. “I was very disappointed to hear that they were planning to hold on to that until 2026. That really creates a sense of total lack of trust in our public health agencies towards vaccination.”

Johnson echoed these concerns, revealing his frustration with the lack of follow-through by health agencies and the committee itself.

“I’m not getting cooperation out of the chairman of the permanent subcommittee investigation to issue subpoenas to get this,” Johnson said, referring to unreleased data and documents.

The senator displayed a chart comparing adverse event reports for various drugs, including ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, to those for COVID-19 vaccines. The stark contrast in reported deaths from these therapeutics — with COVID-19 vaccines showing significantly higher numbers — fueled Johnson’s demand for more transparency.

“As important as the cover-up of the origin story is, there’s a lot more that’s being covered up,” Johnson asserted. “The public has a right to know. We pay for these agencies. We pay their salaries. We fund these studies.”

Redfield agreed with Johnson’s assessment, stating that withholding the information is “counterproductive.”

Redfield doubtful of ‘any benefit from [gain-of-function] research’

Redfield’s testimony took another controversial turn when he called for a pause on gain-of-function research, experiments that involve making pathogens more infectious or deadly.

“I’m not aware of any advanced therapeutic or vaccine that has come to pass because of gain-of-function research,” Redfield said. “I do think there has to be a very aggressive debate of whether there’s any benefit from that research.”

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) seized on this point, introducing his Risky Research Review Act. The bill aims to establish an independent board within the executive branch to oversee federal funding for high-risk life sciences research.

“If the Risky Research Review Act had been in place, it might have prevented the COVID-19 pandemic,” Paul said, citing Redfield’s endorsement.

MIT’s Kevin Esvelt, Ph.D., inventor of a technique for rapidly evolving proteins and other biomolecules who was also instrumental in developing CRISPR gene-editing technology, reinforced these concerns.

Highlighting gaps in current oversight, he described an experiment where his team — with FBI approval — successfully ordered DNA fragments of the 1918 influenza virus from 36 of 38 providers.

“Everything that we did and the companies did was entirely legal,” Esvelt said, underscoring the potential for misuse. “There are no laws regulating DNA synthesis, even though the industry group, the International Gene Synthesis Consortium, has requested congressional regulation.”

The hearing revealed a growing consensus among witnesses for stricter oversight of potentially dangerous research, with Redfield suggesting such studies should be “highly regulated” to protect national security.

Redfield reaffirms COVID lab-leak theory

The hearing reignited debate over the origins of COVID-19, with Redfield reaffirming his belief in the lab-leak theory.

“Based on my initial analysis, I believe then, and I still believe today, that the COVID infections were the direct result of a biomedical research experiment and subsequent lab leak,” Redfield stated.

This assertion led to a heated exchange between Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and Carrie Wolinetz, Ph.D., former chief of staff to then-director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Francis Collins. Hawley accused NIH officials of deliberately suppressing the lab-leak theory.

“Your office, Dr. [Anthony] Fauci and others tried to actively censor them,” Hawley said. “There was a propaganda effort that this paper was the center of, and now everybody says, ‘Oh, well, we just weren’t sure at the time.’”

Hawley referred to the 2020 “Proximal Origin” paper that argued against the lab-leak hypothesis.

Wolinetz defended the NIH’s actions. “I do not believe censorship took place, sir.” She maintained that discussions about the virus’s origins were part of normal scientific discourse.

Redfield, however, criticized the lack of thorough investigation into both natural origin and lab-leak hypotheses. “Unfortunately, this didn’t happen,” he said, adding that four years later, he believes there’s no meaningful evidence supporting a natural origin.

The former CDC director also revealed that he did not learn about concerning biodistribution studies of the vaccine’s lipid nanoparticles until as late as the summer of 2021, suggesting a delay in critical information reaching top health officials.

‘Biosecurity is our nation’s greatest national security threat’

Redfield emphasized the critical importance of biosecurity in national defense.

“In 2024, 2025, biosecurity is our nation’s greatest national security threat,” Redfield stated. “You need to think of it the same way we thought about the verge of nuclear atomic [sic] in the late 40s, 50s, and 60s.”

He called for a proportional response to the threat, suggesting the creation of a dedicated agency within the U.S. Department of Energy to address biosecurity concerns.

“We have a $900 billion Defense Department for the threat of China, North Korea and Russia,” Redfield noted. “We don’t have really any systematic agency or network of private sector contractors to help us with the biosecurity threat.”

Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) echoed this sentiment. “In my humble mind, a viral biosecurity issue is a bigger issue than China’s military threat to us.”

Gerald Parker, DVM, Ph.D., associate dean for Global One Health at Texas A&M University, supported the call for enhanced oversight, recommending “an independent authority to consolidate secure functions in a single entity with a dedicated mission.”

The hearing also touched on the potential for future pandemics, with Redfield repeating his warnings about the potential spread of H5N1 bird flu.

As the hearing concluded, senators from both parties expressed concern over the lack of transparency and oversight in high-risk research.

Paul summarized the sentiment: “We cannot stand idly by. We must demand accountability, strive for transparency and ensure the safety of our citizens is never again compromised by negligence or deceit.”

Watch the July 11 hearing: ‘Risky Research’:

Ex-CDC Director Says It’s High Time to Admit “Significant Side Effects” of Covid-19 “Vaccines”

Tom Ozimek, The Epoch Times — Sun, 19 May 2024 03:33:50 +0000

(The Epoch Times)—Dr. Robert Redfield, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), said Thursday that many officials who tried to warn the public about potential problems with COVID-19 vaccines were pressured into silence and that it’s high time to admit that there were “significant” side effects that made people sick.

Dr. Redfield made the remarks in a May 16 interview with Chris Cuomo on NewsNation, during which he lamented the loss of public confidence in public health agencies because of a lack of transparency around the vaccines, which he said “saved a lot of lives” but also made some people “quite ill.”

“Those of us that tried to suggest there may be significant side effects from vaccines … we kind of got canceled because no one wanted to talk about the potential that there was a problem from the vaccines, because they were afraid that that would cause people not to want to get vaccinated,” Dr. Redfield said.

In his role as head of the CDC, Dr. Redfield was part of the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed, a project to surge COVID-19 vaccine development at a time during the pandemic when little was known about the virus and rapid vaccine rollout was widely seen as key to getting the outbreak under control and lockdowns lifted.

In September 2020, a few months before the first COVID-19 vaccines were given in the United States, Dr. Redfield testified before the Senate that COVID-19 represented the “most significant public health challenge to face our nation in more than a century,” and that the prevailing view among scientists at the time was that the overall case fatality rate of the disease was somewhere between 0.4 and 0.6 percent in the United States.

“If you were to look right now, individuals under the age of 18, it’s about 0.01 percent, 19 to say 69, it’s more like 0.3 percent. And if you’re over the age of 70, it’s about 5 percent now,” he testified at the time.

While there’s lingering controversy about the severity of COVID-19, a recent study estimates that the global case fatality rate was 8.5 percent in February 2020 but had plunged to 0.27 percent in August 2022, meaning that the estimated relative risk reduction over that time was a whopping 96.8 percent.

In his interview on NewsNation, Dr. Redfield said that the vaccines that were developed as part of Operation Warp Speed were “important” and saved “a lot of lives.” However, despite their benefits, the drawbacks of the vaccines must be a matter of open discussion, he said.

“They’re important for the most vulnerable people, those over 60, 65 years of age. They really aren’t that critical for those that are under 50 or younger. But those vaccines saved a lot of lives, but they also—we have to be honest, some people got significant side effects from the vaccine,” he said.

“I have a number of people that are quite ill and they never had COVID, but they are ill from the vaccine,” he continued. “And we just have to acknowledge that.”

Vaccine Controversy

The severity of COVID-19 remains a matter of debate because it’s unclear whether deaths were overcounted or undercounted due to various factors, such as lack of clarity around the role of underlying medical conditions in fatalities in cases where COVID-19 was listed as the primary cause, or underreporting of asymptomatic infections. Aside from the issue of whether people died “from” COVID-19 or “with” a positive test for SARS-CoV-2, there have also been questions about the role of secondary pneumonia caused by mechanical ventilation.

Either way, a study from January 2023 indicates that the global case fatality rate from COVID-19 has dropped dramatically over the course of the pandemic. Global case fatalities ranged from 1.7 to 39.0 percent in February to March of 2020, according to the study—but fell to below 0.3 percent in July to August 2022.

The researchers estimate that the risk of death from COVID-19 has dropped by 96.8 percent over the course of the pandemic.

Along with a decline in COVID-19 fatalities, there have been growing concerns about vaccine side effects, given that a significant number of vaccinated people have reported various adverse reactions.

The most common COVID-19 vaccine adverse events are those that affect the body generally, with fever, fatigue, and overall discomfort being the top three, according to the U.S. Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). But there are others.

For instance, heart muscle inflammation (myocarditis) and inflammation of the lining outside the heart (pericarditis) have both officially been acknowledged by the CDC as a known side effect of Moderna’s and Pfizer’s mRNA COVID-19 vaccines.

Nervous system disorders have also been reported, with such disorders being the third most common in the Pfizer trials, coming after general and muscle-related adverse events.

There have also been papers linking spike-protein-based COVID-19 vaccines to skin problems, a dull ringing in the ears known as tinnitus, visual impairments, blood clotting, and even death. Recent reporting from EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders“ program indicates that the likelihood of death associated with COVID-19 vaccines (in close proximity to the shot rather than proven as caused by it) was over 100 times greater than for flu vaccines.

There are also concerns about a post-vaccination jump in excess deaths and disability.

The CDC still recommends that people of all ages receive a COVID-19 vaccine, saying that the potential side effects do not outweigh the potential harms of getting sick with COVID-19.

In a notice published in late April, the agency again called for adults aged 65 and older to get the latest version of the vaccines.