American Thought Leaders - Former CDC Director Calls for Removal of mRNA Vaccines for COVID-19 | Dr. Robert Redfield

Episode Date: December 10, 2025

Dr. Robert Redfield, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, says he’d like to see the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines phased out and eventually removed from the market.Redfield led the CDC from 2018 to 2021. While an avid proponent of vaccines in general, he hopes that the fallout from the emergency-authorized mRNA vaccines will lead to a broader recognition that vaccine manufacturers must no longer be exempt from liability.Redfield is a clinical virologist who, prior to his appointment as CDC director in 2018, spent decades in HIV/AIDS research and clinical care, including service in the U.S. Army Medical Corps and later at the University of Maryland, where he co-founded the Institute of Human Virology.Over the past few years, he’s been at the forefront of treating patients who were injured by the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines.In my interview with him, we covered at length the many hot topics and questions surrounding the recent pandemic and our pandemic response, among them:How and why was the true origin of SARS-COV-2 suppressed? What indicators were there early on that the virus was likely leaked from a lab? What did Dr. Redfield know from classified documents at the beginning of 2020?What were the most significant missteps America made in its response to the pandemic?Is there a role for gain-of-function research in America? Or should it be outlawed?What is the future of mRNA technology? Should mRNA technology be used for vaccines at all?Why weren’t the vaccine-injured publicly acknowledged and adequately cared for? What kinds of reforms are needed in America’s public health system?Redfield’s new book is titled “Redfield’s Warning: What I Learned (but Couldn’t Tell You) Might Save Your Life.”He argues a lab-created bird flu may be the next pandemic. But are we prepared?Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

How did this virus jump from a bat to man and become the most infectious virus? That's not how these coronaviruses act. In this episode, I sit down with clinical virologist and former CDC director, Dr. Robert Redfield, author of Redfield's Warning. The scientific community went after me aggressively, tried to discredit me, and all I was doing is raising my scientific apostatism. We now know that this epidemic started in Wuhan back in August, September. It didn't start when the proximal origins.

as it started. Almost six years on, have we learned the right lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic? And will there finally be an acknowledgement of those who were injured by the COVID-19 MRNA vaccines? The hardest thing for these patients is that no one believes them. Their lives have been ruined, and most of them got vaccines not because they necessarily wanted to and they had to. What kinds of reforms are needed in America's public health system?

There's a real opportunity to commit ourselves to building a health system. My compensation as a doctor is I'm compensated not for making sure I treat your disease. I'm compensated for keeping you healthy. This is American Thought Leaders and I'm Yankee Kelleck. Dr. Robert Redfield, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Thanks for having me. Glad to be here. So the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research Director Vinay Prasad recently circulated an internal email that talked about how no fewer than 10 child deaths could be related to COVID-19 vaccination. He said, this is a profound revelation for the first time the US FDA

will acknowledge that COVID-19 vaccines have killed American children. What was your reaction to hearing this news? Well, I think it's about time that there was greater transparency. You know, I happen to believe that vaccines are one of the most important gifts of science to modern medicine. That said, they also have a downside, and we have to always evaluate the benefit versus the potential risk with the vaccines. And one of the things I didn't like about rolling out the COVID vaccine, I always felt that it was a vaccine that we had shown prevented serious illness and death in people that were vulnerable. But we never showed any evidence that really prevented infection. So I really think there was a lot of overreach in mandating this vaccine for the broader population.

Now you couple that with open transparency about any side effects or vaccine injury that may have associated with it. But there really was very little transparency in the Biden administration about the negative potential consequences. Right now, I practice clinical medicine still two half days a week.

largely long COVID, and the other part of my practice is vaccine injury from the COVID vaccines. And those vaccines injuries are very real. So I'm glad I had confidence that Marty McCarrie would go in and open up what we know about the vaccine injuries that are occurring and make them available to the American public so they can reevaluate the value of the COVID vaccine for them. I happen to be a big supporter of the CDC's new recommendation. for the COVID vaccine, which they recommended them for people that are over the age of 65 that are vulnerable.

Obviously, with certain morbidities that younger people could have, particularly obesity group with a body mass index graded in 35. But I do not recommend them in general for the general population. So I think this is a breath of fresh air, and I think there's more to come. When it came to children, I don't know what the state of the data around this is, but the last time I looked, there wasn't really any evidence of any child that was healthy having died from COVID. Like they were unusually low risk for a respiratory virus, even as you went, kind of up the age grade, so to speak, it became worse. So was there ever any reason for children to get them? I don't think so. I mean, I always advocated that the vaccine really should have been positioned for the vulnerable,

the nursing homes, people over the age of 65, as I mentioned. There was a different point of view that was pushed on the American public, which was the idea that we had to get this concept of herd immunity, which is really not operational for the coronaviruses at all. It was really a mistake, scientific mistake. But people really pushed that herd immunity, which meant everybody had to be immune. It turns out when I was CDC director, if you looked at age-specific prevalence for COVID-19,

one of the highest groups infected, you know, was actually the 5 to 10-year-olds. They just didn't get sick. So everyone to think children back in March, many people didn't think children were infected with the COVID virus. No, they were infected. They just were asymptomatic and subclinical. So you are right that there's very little. There's very little children that had bad outcomes. There are some, but this was largely a disease with bad outcome for the utterly over 65, 70,

7580. And if you look at the FDA's approval in the vaccine and what led to the approval of Moderna and Pfizer, they were approved for preventing hospitalization and death. They were not approved for preventing infection. And this is where I think the American public was misled. You heard people say, even the President Biden said, you know, vaccinate your children so they don't infect grandma. Well, no, the vaccine doesn't stop transmission. All right.

So I think CDC's finally got it right. The COVID vaccine is for high risk individuals over the age of 65 that have a high risk of hospitalization and death. And I still do advocate it for them. I don't advocate the MRNA vaccines anymore because as you get to the idea of a vaccine injury, when I give you an MRNA vaccine, what I do is I turn your body into a spike protein production factory. And spike protein is a very immunotoxic protein. But I don't know how much you make, and I don't know how long you make it. And these are things that I think the FDA should have been more aggressive in requiring now,

particularly when they went to general approval. How much do you make? And how long do you make it? What's the boundaries? I mean, do you make it for a week? Do you make it for a month? You make it for six months. It's immunotoxic.

So I don't really recommend the MRNA vaccines at all anymore, even for the vulnerable. I recommend a protein vaccine, which is made by Novavax, which when I give you the COVID vaccine as a protein, I know exactly how much. protein I'm giving you, spike protein, and I know the decay curve of that protein in your body. I think it's just a safer way to use these vaccines. I'm still an advocate. I have been vaccinated myself eight times. The COVID vaccine has one of the biggest challenges that doesn't last. So I get vaccinated every six months, but with the protein vaccine. Because I'm still at risk, I'm at risk, for hospitalization and death if I get COVID.

What about this idea that natural immunity was discounted? It's really an unacceptable lack of scientific debate. I mean, I think the idea that we had individuals that could show they had immunity greater than you get with a vaccine, and yet they still were mandated to get the vaccine in order to, you know, be a firefighter or policemen or go to the hospital or or travel was just anti-scientific. You're giving me a hint here that you're against mandating, at least COVID vaccines. Is there ever a place for mandates in your mind? Well, for COVID vaccines, I don't think at all.

I mean, if we had evidence that we could prevent infection, you know, universally, then we can get into a debate about it. But I'm a big believer of personal autonomy. me. When I was CDC director, one of the things that I had to deal with the first year was that year before I was CDC director, we lost more children than any other year from flu. They died. And when I looked into what the children had in common, they had really one thing in common. Their parents chose not to vaccinate them. And so then I looked into flu vaccine in general, and I found out, you know, only 50% of the American public takes a flu vaccine. And when you look at the flu vaccine, on a good year, it only works half the time. And my first year, CDC director, it had about 25% protection for infection. So if you only have 50% of the population vaccinated and it only works half the time,

now you're talking only 25% are protected. Of course, we have flu all the time. So I decided we have to change why the American public doesn't take the flu vaccine, even realizing it doesn't work that well. And I went on a campaign that I called Vaccinate with Confidence. So when I looked at the population, 50% took the vaccine. When I looked at African Americans, it was in the high 30s. When I looked at Hispanics, it was in the 20s.

And I started working with the media for the African American media, the Hispanic media, to try to get it. get people to realize that vaccines for the flu, at least if you do get infected, kind of like COVID, if you do get infected and you're vaccinated, you're not going to die. Your children are going to die. I think it's a better thing to educate people so they choose to be vaccinated rather than mandating it. And so I'm a big advocate for personal choice when it comes to vaccines. The numbers that you described to me do not make me want to take the flu vaccine at all. And what they want to make me do is make sure I have a strong immune system, make sure I take

my vitamin D, K, you know, basically just sort of healthy, stay healthy. And that probably will be probably the most effective thing. And then I don't have to worry about whether someone is trying to hide negative effects, you know, side effects. Because every medical product, every vaccine has side effects. I think you're insightful. I think it's a very, real the reality is the flu vaccine doesn't work very well it's not a very good vaccine this is you know again i talk on my book about my big concern about the next pandemic which is a bird flu pandemic okay and some people don't believe that that's going to happen i think it's going to happen but i do think the answer for countermeasures is not a vaccine because the flu vaccines don't work very

well. And that's why when the Biden administration gave $750 million to Moderna to make an MRNA flu vaccine, I thought that's the wrong approach. The right approach from my point of view is to go and develop antivirals that can work. And I would agree with you that there's the potential that if you had a really good antiviral, and I'm working on one right now with a company that I'm involved with called Tras Pharma, if you have a good antiviral, and we have one now that's in phase two trials in Australia that I can give you a single dose and it stays in your body for at least three weeks, you could conceptually look at chemoporphylaxis that could prevent during flu season and actually work, not in 50% or 25% of people, but everybody, that chemoprophalaxis

could really replace the vaccine because the flu vaccines are really not very good. vaccines. They're not vaccines like measles or polio that really work. So I think you're right. I mean it's one of the reasons I think people dismiss vaccines in general because of their experience, I get the flu vaccine and guess what happens? I get flu. So they say these vaccines don't work. And so I think you're right about honest discussion with the American public about the limitations of the flu vaccine. I'm a big advocate of moving towards chemoporphylaxis, antivirals as really much more solid countermeasures for, say, flu, for example. Look at the COVID vaccine program, and I was part of Operation Workspeed.

We developed those vaccines in less than nine months. The vulnerable, at one time, you can remember we were losing 3,000 people a day. I mean, it was not a good time when we first got this pandemic into our population. And if you remember, the freezer cars outside the hospitals in New York were quite significant. And yet we developed a vaccine faster than ever, and yet 1.2 million people died. So to me, it tells you the limitations of vaccine as a countermeasure. And we ought to be looking at the alternative, which is antivial drug development. There was a huge problem during that time.

You know, I did a lot of reporting with a lot of doctors who were treating it actually incredibly successfully. And so there were all sorts of products which doctors figured out through trial and error that actually were very effective. You know, some of them are extremely controversial. I don't want to sort of dig in, but there were something like 20 different methods of treatment. And the other part that was very important was that you catch it early because it's this two-stage disease once you let it progress. Once you get into cytokine storm phase, it's a whole different. disease. A hundred percent. So except that the protocols that we were using were all almost like, I mean, some people said they were designed to get you to the cytokines surface, which is,

you know, and we ventilate you once you're already cytokine stage. No, you, right. The early intervention, you know, is the key, you know, and obviously this was really important for the president when he got COVID and we got him on the antibodies from regeneron, you know. But I remember when he got better, he wanted to leave the hospital right away. And I was arguing with this doctor, no, you keep him in the hospital because he's still at risk for the cytokine phase. And it'd be better for him to be in the hospital if he hits that cytokine phase than to be home, of course, he made his own decisions. Let's just leave it at that. So, but you are right. I mean, I know with hydroxychloroquine, for example, I was the CDC director, and people were

using hydroxychloroquine off-label. I'm a big advocate for physicians and patients to make those decisions of oslabel, whether it's ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine. I personally don't think there's evidence that they work that can convince me scientifically, but I know lots of patients that will swear to you they benefit from it. So when hydroxychloriclin was being talked about, the president talked about it, one of the things I did is the head of CDC is I decided that the MMWR was going to publish everything we knew about hydroxychloroquine so that if physicians chose to use. use hydroxychloroquine, they at least knew what we knew. All right. I got pummeled by CDC, my

colleagues at CDC, really very angry at me. How can you do that? How can you endorse this? There's no data. I said, I'm not endorsing it. I'm just presenting the data. So they know what doses doctors have used, what side effects people have had, you know, so they can use that to make the judgment that's informed by everything that we know. I didn't do it for ivermectin because most of us knew a lot about iMectin. We used it for parasitic diseases, but I agree with you there was a lot of therapies. And one of the things I learned in my years as an AIDS doctor, and I did that, you know, for now almost 40 years, that I learned a lot by just listening to my patients.

they would come in and tell me they're taking milk thistle. I said, what do you mean you're taking milk thistle? I'm taking milk this. And all of a sudden I learned after a year or two watching, my patients that took milk thistle didn't have problems with getting liver enzyme elevation when they got these medicines. So it somehow protected the liver from getting a transaminitis. The same thing I do now in my COVID patients, I have so many patients with long COVID, and

There's no real approved therapy. Most of the patients that I treat, I'm treating with off-label drugs, and I'm learning from them. You know, we work together. I say, this is what I think. What do you think? You want to try this?

They say, okay, let's try this. And then we learn. I think it was really wrong in our country where doctors lost their license because they prescribed hydroxychloroquine. Or Ivermectin. I think it's really, really wrong. How can you tell the difference in your practice between long COVID and vaccine injury?

And the reason that I'm asking this is because I know a number of doctors who know they're treating vaccine injury, but they call it long COVID because it's unacceptable basically in their systems to say that it's vaccine injury. Well, I call vaccine injury vaccine injury. It is hard to get it coded, okay? So you end up coding it as a vaccine reaction when we really talk about its injury. And sometimes just to get it coded in the system, you end up deferring to long COVID, but in the records, you'll say it's vaccine, and how do I do that?

Well, one is by history, you know, you'll have a patient that will tell you two or three weeks, four weeks after they got their second MRNA vaccine, an event happened to them. So there's a temple relationship. I can test their blood for antibodies against the COVID virus that are not spike protein. And so one of them is called nuclear capsid. So if I look at their blood and I look for nuclear capsid and they don't have nuclear capsid antibody, it tells me they haven't seen natural COVID.

They temporarily say this happened after the usually the second dose of the MRNA vaccine. it's a clinical diagnosis. Now, more commonly, patients who have vaccine injury have also had COVID. All right, so they've had COVID, and they give a history that will tell you, you know, doc, you know, after I got my second or third dose of this vaccine, you know, 10 days later, two weeks later, all these things started to happen. So it's a temporal relationship. But it is a clinical diagnosis.

But it is something that's important to be able to do. And it's very sad. I tell a story about a patient that I had who's very special to me, managing a lot of a company, and she got COVID. And subsequent to that, she lost her ability to communicate. And when I mean that, I mean she couldn't speak. more than two to five words at a time because she couldn't remember what the next words were. And when I saw her first name's Joy, same as my wife, I turned to Joy and I said, Joy,

I need to tell you that you're the sickest person I've ever seen from cognitive dysfunction from COVID. She immediately burst out in tears. Very awkward. She had a friend with her. I had her leave and told her come back to see me next week to continue our conversation. When she came back the next week, I had told my wife the story, and my wife said she thought I had a better bedside manner than that, or she gave me a hard time. So when Joy came back, I said, Joy, I want to start by apologizing to you for telling you the truth because you are the sickest person I've ever seen with cognitive dysfunction.

But maybe I could have done it in a kinder way. And she said in her own way, and it took forever because she could only speak in two or three words blurbs. She said, Dr. Redfield, when you told me I was the sickest person you ever seen. I didn't cry because you told me I was the sickest person you'd ever seen. I cried because you're the first doctor acknowledged I was sick. That's the problem most long COVID patients have. I have another gentleman that's more like the patient you asked me about the vaccine. asked me about the vaccine, had a wonderful business. And he got COVID vaccine, an MRI

vaccine. And about two to three weeks later, he started having some big problems, cognitive dysfunction, fatigue, and post-exertional exhaustion. And Eddie, it's persistent. He's been my patient now for almost four years. And I have him on some off-label treatment, just like I did Joy. He also, it's really interesting. Most people don't understand COVID that are doctors. They think COVID is a lung disease. COVID's not a lung disease. It's a blood vessel disease. And one of the things it does, because the key receptor for the spike protein, is a receptor that lines all our blood vessels, the endothelium of our blood vessels. The blood vessels, the blood vessels, don't end up working as well, the veins.

They don't stay open. And so if there's an artery that goes on top of the vein, it compresses the vein, and so the vein can't get the blood back to where it's supposed to go. And I had a number of patients that they're very hard to be in a room with that are starving for air. They'll tell you they're hungry for air, they can't breathe.

And yet you evaluate their heart all the way through cats, they're normal. You evaluate their lungs, they're like. lungs are normal. But these people are desperate. They can't breathe. And so what could that be? And I finally figured it out, working with a colleague of mine in Birmingham, that the reason they couldn't breathe is they're not returning blood to their heart. And why aren't they returning to blood to their heart? Because in their pelvis, the pelvic veins are being compressed. We call it pelvic pain compression syndrome. And they then start forming other veins to try to get

the blood back to the vina cava, so now they're pulling more and more blood in their pelvis. Normally 70% of our blood's in the veins, but now you add another 5, 10%, they're not getting blood back to the heart. So they're starving for air. And who would believe, like this gentleman who had the vaccine and had all those symptoms, the other symptom he had, was air hunger. And I figured out that he had pelvic vein compression syndrome, and we put a stent in that vein to keep it open and they're almost instantaneously able to breathe so who would have believed that from COVID but there are cases like that from the vaccine there are cases like that from COVID and the hardest thing for these patients is that no one believes them when I started a couple

years ago I've been doing this actually you know almost for five four four and a half years now So when I started, almost all my patients came to me via psychiatry, okay? Yeah, because... Functional disorder. They were told they were, this was a, you know, psychiatric reaction. It's not real. So, but now I'm happy to say that very few of my patients come to me from psychiatry, meaning the medical community is starting to wake up and realizing long COVID is real.

And they're realizing that it's a clinical diagnosis so they don't feel comfortable being the one to make it because they're not an expert. So they end up sending them to people like me or Jordan Vaughn and Birmingham. You know, there's probably a dozen of us around the United States that have just specialized in only doing this. You know, hopefully soon there'll be a test that we can do that will affirm the diagnosis. But it is hard because most clinicians are used to doing a test and saying, yes, this is what you have. So, you know, I'm disappointed that I don't think we should have immunity for the vaccine companies for vaccine injury. These people have very little recourse to go. Their lives have been ruined.

And most of them got vaccines not because they necessarily wanted to. They had to. I just saw a patient recently, wonderful young individuals. in their early 20s, very, very sick because they had to get a vaccine in order to go to college and had a very serious vaccine entry. Well, you know, as a little background, my wife, Cindy and I, we made a film, mostly with Cindy doing the work, made a film for Epoch Times called The Unseen Crisis. And the reason it's called The Unseen Crisis is because of the phenomena that you're just

describing, all sorts of people having very serious. typically neurological problems and so forth that are clearly associated with vaccines but just no one would believe them and this phenomenon as far as I can tell I mean we made this film a number of years ago persists that and one one side you know doctors don't recognize that this is a possible diagnosis possible reality and the other part is if they suspect it might be there they're also afraid to actually even suggest that this might be the case because the system seems to be wired in such a way as to

say, never say it's vaccine injury. Do you, do you, does this make sense? No, I think the truth to it. I mean, it's why if you have expertise, you know, it's easier. For me, as an unbelievable advocate of vaccines, I spent most of my life developing vaccines, you know, for me to tell you that I think you're got vaccine injury, you know, I don't get to pushback. All right, but most people do, you know, the Secretary Kennedy, who I have a lot of respect for, he's not anti-vaccine. But if he just asked the question about a side effect for a vaccine, everyone says, oh, you're anti-vaccine. No, I just want to know the side effect. Or if you ask the question, what's the data we have on efficacy of using hepatized B vaccine and children under the age of one month?

How many, what's the data? Oh, you're anti-vaccine. No, I'm not anti-vaccine. I just want to know the data. Show me the data, all right, on what the policy is based on. So I think, but I do think you're right. People are very hesitant. For a long time, it was unacceptable to suggest that this was the vaccines.

You had to say the vaccines are safe. The other thing I'll say about long COVID is that's important, and I've seen it now many, many, many times. patients with long COVID get better, right? I will say the group that has vaccine injury and symptoms of long COVID from vaccine injury seem to get better, slower, okay, in my clinical experience. The ones that I have that are celebrating their fourth and fifth and sixth year, you know, those individuals seem to disproportionately be people that I think had done. vaccine injury. People that had long COVID from COVID, I seem to really seem to resolve it within

18 to 36 months in general. I had a young woman the other day, very prominent young woman. She was having trouble. So I finally decided to put her on an off-label regimen that I use for people with cognitive dysfunction who have trouble maintaining their job. And lo and behold, she comes back and sees me in about three to four weeks and she says, I'm better. I said, Kate, how can you be better that fast? Medicine doesn't work that fast. And she says, oh, I never took the medicine. But I'm better. And that's really important because people just get better. It's not like Alzheimer's or you don't get better. And I do find I have a lot of patients that have thanked me, doctors that were giving up their practice of medicine because of COVID, figuring that they could no longer function

effectively. I taught them how I have all my books on my phone, so don't be embarrassed to take your phone and look something up while the patient's there. You know, it's no big deal. You can do it. Now, and this guy, the first guy was anesthesiologist. I said, your patients are asleep. He said, I don't even have to explain it to them. He said, no, I just don't feel right. I just can't remember anything. I said, you're going to get better. Don't give up your practice. Once you could take a leave of absence. If you give up, you're never going to get back in the saddle. And he came, you know, six months later, came back and thanked me.

And I said, what are you thanking me for? And he said, well, you told me I'm going to get better. And I can tell I'm getting better. And so I took a leave of absence, and now I'm starting to work my way back into medicine. And I've seen him recently. He did some missionary work down in Central America. I was practicing and doing great. So it's just so important to realize you can get better.

I have one young lady that's really remarkable, and she was mountain biking all through Colorado, and she got COVID. Three weeks later, she couldn't function in any other position than laying down. She had such autonomic dysfunction from the COVID. And she actually lived on a stretcher for almost six months, right? She had to move in, people take care of her. She had to be transported in a station wagon type thing, and, you know, laying down. down. I mean, she fully lived on a stretcher. You know, I just supported her. And I told when she came in to see me, I said a prayer, I happened to believe in God. And I said a prayer,

and I said, God, this lady is too sick. I have no idea what to do for it. I was just starting to do my long COVID experience. Now fast forward three and a half years later, she finished her first book on Beatitude. She's back teaching multiple classes. She's biking. driving a car, she's totally normal. Totally normal. That's one of the things that excites me about long COVID is people do just get better. The problem is getting in the care and treatment

they need while they're sick. And probably one of the biggest damages that happens to these patients is that the medical community doesn't accept that they have an illness and try to tell them they have some psychological problem. You know, there was a, database i remember created specifically for covid and vaccinate the impact of the vaccines i believe

it was shut down now but it showed that something like seven to eight percent of people needed to have some sort of serious medical attention after getting uh after getting the shots or you know the ver's database showed you know this you know it better than i did this massive spike in injury reports even though people were discouraged from actually providing those reports in the first place. So in this situation, right, that we're in, so what do we do here? Well, I think this is why we should feel a sense of hope that we have Marty McCarrie at the FDA right now and his team, because I think they really are going to open up the books and be transparent and truly try to get at understanding the reality of vaccine side effects,

vaccine injury, vaccine reactions. I think that the reality is, I, vaccine was approved in December 14th, I think, and I was out of office by January 20th. So I had very little influence on vaccine policy. And that really was the Biden administration that took over and really, you know, and remember, he said he'd never mandate the vaccine. And the next thing, I find out they mandated it for all the soldiers and everybody, and they became mandated. So, and this is where I think, you know, think Secretary Kennedy is. He wants the data. You know, he's not going to just take your word for it that, you know, it's, you know, let's show the data. Some people who otherwise would benefit from vaccines now are reluctant to get vaccines because they just, they don't trust

the system. Right. Some vaccines may be have no benefit to them, but there are vaccines that do clearly benefit patients and they would benefit by accepting them, but they have to, They have to make that decision for themselves. I'm not a, I don't agree with mandating vaccines. A lot of my colleagues push back to me because you think, what do you mean you have to mandate vaccines? No, I need to educate people why they want to choose vaccines. It sounded like you're suggesting you'd want to reappeal of this 1986 act that

granted immunity to pharmaceutical companies that produce vaccines. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I think it's, I think it was a mistake. I understand it because at the time I was deep into vaccine research and we were losing all the vaccine companies, you know, and nobody wanted to make vaccines because the long-term liability issues. But I think there are other ways to solve the problem than blanket immunity. They could have done a cap. You know, they could have said, okay, vaccine injury will have a cap, you know.

they could have had, you can, vaccine injury, but statute of limitations is five years, you know, or whatever. They, there's a lot of ways they're going to ground it. But I think they have to remove the lack of liability from the vaccine companies, all right? And there's lots of ways they've done this. They can do this. But I think that was not a step forward, all right? I don't think it helped. And actually, when you look at the whole program with the vaccine injury, when I was CDC director, I was shocked. Certain people that get shoulder problems for the injection.

I mean, they basically only have to say I have a shoulder problem, and all of a sudden they get a check for $100,000. What's that about? So I do think that has to be revisited. It's complicated in how you do that and still stimulate innovation in the industry. industry. We don't want to have all our vaccines made offshore. But I do think the lack of accountability for their product is, it needs to be repealed. You know, the argument is if these products in 1986 were creating so much liability that these companies couldn't be profitable, Doesn't that suggest the product's bad in the first place? I don't know the answer to that, because I do think the liability issues can be so significant

that you and the investors in that company just can't. Can't take the risk. You can't take the risk for that you're going to get several hundred million dollars judgments against you. So given our conversation, what do you make of groups like the American Academy of Pediatric? recommending COVID vaccination for children? Yeah, I don't think it's data-driven. You know, I think it's more ideological.

It's unfortunate. Same thing with the obstetrical groups, you know. So I'll just leave it at that. I don't think they're grounded in science, and they're sort of grounded in their emotion and partially around the concept that all vaccines are good and there's no downside. And I just think that's the wrong philosophy.

It should be that vaccines are the greatest gift, in my view, of science and modern medicine. But that said, they still need to be used in a thoughtful way for where the benefit far outweighs any of the risk. So in that vein, what came to my attention watching everything over the last five years, let's say, is that there seems to be an acceptance of what you would call a noble lie, and the noble lie being what you just said, that all vaccines are perfectly safe, with the idea, perhaps well-intentioned, right, that if people don't believe that, they might not do it. Yeah, I think there's a lot of truth that done.

I think that's what happened really during the COVID pandemic for sure that people assumed that anything that would be negative would dissuade people from getting the vaccine. And it had already been made a decision that everyone need to be vaccinated. I mean, for example, CDC stopped tracking patients that were vaccinated. They got infected. And you had the President of the United States themselves say, this is a very epidemic of the unvaccinated. And I'm sitting in Maryland realizing that half my cases that have of new COVID are occurring in vaccinated people. One of the problems that COVID just underscored

in general, there's too much group think. You know, if you think like the group or you're out, I mean, I know when it came to the origins of COVID, I was pretty confident in my hypothesis. you know, there were two things, spillover or lab leak. And pretty much by the end of January in 2020, my analysis was it what's most more likely was a lab leak. And part of the reasons is just how the virus affects humans and how infectious it was for humans, etc., which was really totally different than SARS or MERS ever was.

But I will tell you, the group think basically pushed me aside. I mean, I wasn't even included. included in the big calls in the first week of February that discussed the origin. You know, now Tony will say he didn't exclude me, and I never said that Tony excluded me. I said, what I said was Tony didn't include me. It's a big difference, you know, so I wasn't included in those calls. And had I been included in those calls, I guarantee you I wouldn't have changed my opinion within 72 hours by just listening to the arguments.

And as you pointed out already, the Proximal Origin paper is a paper that I actually think needs to be retracted. I think it's almost fraudulent. It definitely should be retracted, and those investigators should all retract it. That's fascinating, of course. When it comes to Tony, you're talking about Dr. Tony Fauci, of course, and with the Proximal Origins paper,

we're talking about a. A paper that appeared very early in COVID, which basically said it has to be natural origin. Any suggestion that it's from a lab is false. And you said earlier that just looking at how the virus affected people, if I heard you correctly, that made you think it was a lab spillover over natural origin or natural spillover. Now, that's fascinating. I hadn't heard that before. our own analysis. We did a documentary very early in the pandemic about this topic.

And it just, there were many features of the virus specifically as well as things that happened in that lab, which happened to be right where the virus seemed to have originated, that it was a kind of looks like a duck, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck type analysis. And that has only been strengthened over the years with all sorts of other evidence. But I did not realize that there's something about how the behavior. of the virus itself that made you think it might be from a lab. Explain that to me, please. Well, you know, you have to take a look at me.

What I am, I'm a clinical virologist, and with an emphasis on the word clinical virologist. And I've always studied how viruses affect the human host, right? And so when COVID started, and I remember calling my counterpart, George Gao, who's the head of CDC, China, in the first, New Year's Eve, the first couple days of the new year in January, and talking to George, and he was telling me that they had 27 cases of a new pneumonia that was not SARS and wasn't flu, that all came from the wet market.

I asked George for his case definition, and he said it was people with a pneumonia illness that wasn't flu, wasn't SARS, and they came from the wet market. I said, well, George, by definition, everybody came from the wet market. Why are you trying to pin it on the wet market? You need to go outside the wet market and look at people that have a respiratory illness that's not flu and not SARS in Wuhan and see whether this has anything to do with the wet market at all.

And of course, George did that, and a couple days later called me back and said, Bob, we have hundreds of cases and it has nothing to do with the wet market. So we knew that from the beginning. Second thing we knew from the beginning is, and some of this was classified at the time, much of it's been declassified now, so anything I say is declassified, we now know that this epidemic started in Wuhan back in August September. It didn't start in, when the

proximal origin says it started. George also told me two things. He said, he saw there's no asymptomatic infection. That turned out to be wrong, dead wrong. And he told me that he was really confident of, oh, and there's no human-to-human transmission. Also turned out to be dead wrong. Partially, that was based on his observation known noosocomial infection for the patients that were in the hospital to the health care workers. And for me, I had 14 cases that we had diagnosed in the U.S. in the last couple weeks of January and the beginning of February, and they had about 800 contacts, and all the contacts that I evaluated, well, and they had two infections. So I also concluded that this virus was not very infectious.

Now, how did I diagnose those two contacts? Well, what we did was we, since there was no asymptomatic infections, we asked people, were they sick? And if they weren't sick, that was it. We didn't do anything else. If they were sick, then we tested him for the COVID virus and found out the two of them were actually infected. Well, that was the wrong way to do it. What we should have done is test everybody. Broad tear of prevalence. And what we did is several weeks later, the Diamond Princess happened, and the Japanese government asked for our help, and we went into help. And in doing

that, we decided to test everybody in the ship. And lo and behold, we find out half the people in the ship are infected, and most of them are asymptomatic. We realized our whole premise for our public health response was wrong. Now, why did we get there? We got there, because Because in January at the beginning, what happened very early? Everyone said this was SARS-like. Well, what do we know about SARS? SARS came in 2002, 2003. All right?

It came in from a bat through civet cats into humans. But once it got into humans, it never really learned how to efficiently go human to human. All right? And so as you and I sit here today, you know, over 20 years later, there's still less than 10,000 cases. of SARS that ever happened in humans that we diagnosed. MERS comes in in 2012, 2013, from a bat to a camel to humans. And it never learns how to go efficiently human to humans. So we're also less than 10,000 cases as we look, you know, here 11, 12, 15 years later.

COVID, when it came in, was immediately one of the most infectious. viruses that we've ever seen. I'll argue that it's probably right underneath measles, the second most infectious. How did this virus jump from a bat to man and become the most infectious virus? That's not how these coronaviruses act. It takes them a long time to learn how to be efficiently infected in man. As I said today, they still have it. So you would have been seeing lower levels of infection, this thing coming up previously over. years or something of this nature. We should. And so then I'm saying, okay, this doesn't sound right. And then of course I know because of my my virology that the Wuhan Institute of

Ruralogy is one of the leading COVID coronavirus research labs in the world. And so I researched their work and find out in 2014 they published a paper. that shows they taught the coronavirus how to infect humanized mice through the H2 receptor. So they actually were doing work trying to teach this, teach coronaviruses to infect human tissue. Right. So to me, it became, this virus was way too infectious for humans, for it to be a natural, bat to human phenomena and then I go ahead and look at the COVID virus and I find out that it's really not very good at infecting bats anymore so can infect them but

it's it's not efficient in bats so how did this virus somehow go from bat to human cause this pandemic but now forget how to infect bats right That's a problem. And then there was, at the time, classified document, it's declassified now, so I can comment on it, that showed that when you looked at the molecular analysis of the virus, you're a molecular biology type, they showed that it had 12 nucleotides

that we call a furin cleavage site, which the importance of that furin cleavage site is to know what it does. And what it does is it changes the orientation of the SARS binding site for its receptor. So that when the furin cleaver site isn't operational, the virus still likes to bind to the bat. But you put a furin cleaver site in there,

and it changes the orientation. Now that binding site likes to bind to the H2 receptor, which is the human. receptor. So there's a functionality of it. It even gets a little more complicated in that classified document that if you look at those 12 nucleotides, two of them, six of them actually, two triplet pairs code for arginine. And if you know anything I remember from your biology that each of these three nucleotides

code for an amino acid, but there's different triplets that can code for an amino acid. So for arginine, they can have a series of different triplets that say arginine, right? Turns out the triplets in this virus code for arginine that's preferred in humans. It's not the arginine that's preferred in bats. So you have to say yourself, how did that happen? And again, you couple that with the fact that you knew that this lab was trying to intentionally teach these viruses how to infect humans. But for me, the real answer was that the rapid ability for it to go human to human to the

degree that it did. It's just the behavior for you that was the most important. Behavior. And this is why I always argue with Tony because Tony is an immunologist, okay? I'm a virologist. And I argued that the virology of how this virus is affecting man made me basically say the probability of the origin was the laboratory and not the wet market. Did you try to alert people to this?

Because I remember this time, right? We didn't realize what hit us entirely when we published this documentary. Let's just say it was the wrong thing to say, right? Even though, again, it was, and the argument is even not that far different from what you just explained, right? But it was clearly not an acceptable... I am obviously at the White House Coronavirus Task Force, that Vice President Pence chaired, that I was a member of.

I obviously articulated my position for the task force. These were obviously confidential conversations. They weren't classified, but they were confidential. So I didn't take the task force discovery, discussions will put them in the public domain. Secretary Pompeo asked me to be his advisor to help him interpret a number of classified documents. The one I'm talking about now has been declassified. I wish that all of them would be declassified. You know, the Congress voted for them to all be classified, and I hope

the President will finally declassify them all. Because, but that one was the first document that really described the Furring Cleaver site. All right. And a lot of the the molecular biology that I just talked to you about. And I told Pompeo that this was a smoking gun, that there's no way that this fear and cleaver site popped in there. Now, you'll hear people who want to poo-poo people like me. They'll say, oh, other coronaviruses have fear and cleaver sight. Not this family of viruses, right?

This is highly unique. But I did, obviously, I did express my self-aggressively to the White House Task Force, vice president, the president, everybody in the task force. You'll leave him, Mike Pence's, I've done a podcast with him, and he's in his book. He'll say how Redfield said it came from the laboratory, and Fauci guaranteed him that came from the wet market. So I think a lot of people took Fauci's point of view over my point of view.

And clearly, I wasn't allowed to be part of the discussion that the NIH had. on origins in the first week of February. Again, correcting the record, says, Ketani gets mad at me, and he says, I said he excluded me. I said, no, I never said you excluded me. I said you didn't include me. All right, there's a difference.

So anyhow, and I didn't realize, I obviously made huge news after I was out, I don't remember the exact date of it, when I did the Sanja Gupta interview, and Sandy asked me what I thought about the origin of the virus. I said it came from the laboratory. Yes. And then my life was not a good thing to be in after that because the next day the Baltimore son came after me saying I was an Asian racist.

It was, you know, I had the state legislators of Maryland passing resolutions that I should be sanctioned, you know, as a racist. They told Hogan that he had to fire me. You know, they passed a resolution against me. And Hogan, to his credit, stood up for me. He said, you know, I'm married to an Asian woman. My kids are Asian. My grandkids are Asian. One thing I can tell you, Redfield's not an Asian racist.

He's just telling you what his assessment is as a virologist. And I got, you know, the scientific community went after me aggressively. Tried to discredit me, you know. And all I was doing is raising my scientific hypothesis. This back in January, and I told Fauci and Collins, I said, there's two hypotheses. And the scientific approach is to go after both of them. They didn't want to have a debate. As you said, they came out with the Proximal Origin paper, which was really a planted paper.

You know, I'll never forget when Tony brought it up at the White House press conference and said, we have this paper that I don't know who the authors are, but I'll get back to you, that says, you know, that it came from the wet market. No, that was all planted. That paper was kind of a seminal moment for me during the pandemic. I remember because when I read it, I thought to myself, this is obviously not true, right? And I think most people with basic biology training

or molecular biology training would come to that conclusion. I don't think it required some sort of advance, but because it was so absolutist in its assertions, right? You want to talk about loss of trust, you know, nature, or this was, I believe, a nature subjournal. Yeah, no, they should redirect it. This was, I dreamed about being published in this in my previous life, right? And, but to see this.

They lost a lot of credibility. And then, and then Lancet lost the credibility, too, when they had the commission, and they put the head guy from EcoHealth Alliance, DASIC to be the head guy to decide on the origin of the virus. And DASIC was involved in all this thing. My friend Jeff Sasse, who was part of that commission, finally came to me and talked to me,

and when he finally figured all this out, and we explained the virology to him, he finally resigned from it. He was so angry that they had set this up, where they put highly conflicted individuals into these scientific committees to make these decisions. You know, I think the American public now, if you look at most people now know that the most likely origin of this virus was that it came

from the lab. I always said after the first year that this won't unfortunately be defined by science anymore. We could have done it if we did it the first, you know, right away. It will be defined by the intelligence community. That's where the real answer is. But this was clearly a, in my view, dual-use research that was being done in the Chinese lab. I happen to think for good reasons, I think they were trying to develop a vaccine vector. And unfortunately, you know, the science, arrogance about it all, they didn't really have the containment that they need to be able to do this kind of research. So it's interesting. That's also my, you know, much less educated assessment, what you

just said. That's what I thought for a while. But the practical reality is they have a very high priority in their own bio-weapons research. We know that from their own documentation. So, you know, this lab was obviously a bio-weapons research lab, among other things, right? Yeah, or biodefine. I've always argued I thought they were doing biodefense

similar to what we do, but then some people argue once they solved the biodefense problem, then that opens up the opportunity. for them to have a bio-offense program. I'm still going to give them the benefit of the doubt that they were developing a biodefense program, a vaccine vector that could really vaccinate the vaccine, the Chinese military, the Chinese people, and beyond.

And for that vector to be useful, it had to be aerosol droplet. It needed to not make you sick. That's why they've knocked out the interfering response element. That's another manipulation of this virus. It's not normal. And then they also knocked out certain what we call areas where they would have an immunodominant response. So you don't get a dominant response to this virus, which is critical if you want to use it over and over and over and over again.

And that's why there's no lasting immunity to this virus. So that you and I could actually insert the hepatitis antigen or the polio antigen or whatever. We could use this now as a highly contagious vaccine. against all different things. I think that was their intent, but people don't realize. Respiratory viruses are very hard to contain. But talk about lack of informed consent. Yeah, there's no informed consent in that regard.

I mean, that's exactly right. And there's a lot of other problems with this that people don't want to talk about is, you know, that this research was largely funded by the United States government. You know, the Defense Department, the State Department, the USAID, and NIH all funded this research. Some of the most important collaborators for this research were the University of North Carolina, Ralph Barrett, and his group. So this is, you know, when people used to accuse me of going after the Chinese, I said, I'm not going after the Chinese. I mean, the Chinese should be held accountable. And I worked with the Heritage Foundation on our report on this for not following the international health regulations because they didn't follow the international health regulations.

And therefore, they should be held accountable for that. But the research was a joint research project between the United States and China. and maybe some other countries. Is there any place for gain of function research? No. I don't see it. You know, maybe 50 years ago when we didn't have the scientific power that we have now, but we have so much scientific power right now. And if I may jump in, just define for me, because this is also contentious,

define for me when I say gain of function research, what do you mean when you say there's no place for gain of function research? What is it there's no place for? For me, I just think gain of function research is something that has far too much risk to the potential benefit. But we're talking about teaching a virus to be more infectious. Or more pathogenic. More infectious. Yeah, so when gain of function researches, we take a pathogen and we intentionally teach it how to be more pathogenic or more transmissible or both.

This is important. Some people jump at me and are upset with me. They don't think I'm hard enough on my colleague, and I would still say a friend, Anthony Fauci, because I would say, and I've told Ram Paul and his people this, that I don't think Fauci actually lied before Congress. I do think he misled Congress, but I don't think he lied. And why do I say that? I said, listen very carefully what he says. He says, according to the definition of the National Academy of Science, we weren't doing gain-of-function research.

It's a very important phrase because what they did in 2017 is National Academy of Science came up with the definition of gain of function research because Obama had outlawed and Fauci and Collins wanted to do it. And this is where they slipped in an exemption

for them to be able to grant waivers to different projects provided they go through certain committees which of course this project never went through which is one of the mistakes. But they defined gain of function research is if you have a path to that's already pathogenic for man,

and you make it more pathogenic for man or more transmissible for man, that's gain of function research. But if you start with a pathogen, like COVID-19, that's not pathogenic for man, and you teach it to be pathogenic for man or more transmissible for man. By definition, they say that's not gain of function.

Of course it's gain a function. I mean, it's an arbitrary definition, it was a word game that was done, in my view, to support the comment that NIH could say they weren't doing gain of function research. Because they were doing gain of function research. So, no, I did the Wall Street Journal op-ed that I put out a couple of years ago, or I tried to make the arguments that we should not be doing gain-of-function research. When I was CDC director, one of the more difficult decisions I made was I shut down Fort Detrick. Fort Dietrich was doing research and one of the things CDC does is it inspects all these high containment laboratories and Fort Dietrich had some defects and so we went back a month later and to see if they

corrected the defects and they hadn't corrected the defects so they came to me with the report and I said shut them down. Now these were my friends I was in the Army for 23 years. I had to call the commander and say, we're shutting you down. And they were, you know, hey, we have all the experiments. We got this money. I said, no, you know, biocontainment's not a, it's not optional. You had these things. You were cited. They're not corrected. We're shutting you down. Until you get everything corrected, we'll come back and we can reopen you at a time in the future. Biocontainment's not easy, and for a respiratory pathogen is really, really, really, really difficult. I think there's very few places, if anywhere, that can really have maximum containment of respiratory pathogens.

So my view is that I don't think we need to be making these pathogens more pathogenic or more transmissible. I think we have enough tools right now that we can figure things out within two. two, three, four weeks. You know, in the old days where we might have gotten a two-year jump, you may want to make an argument, but I don't think the human conditions served by us doing this research. I do think there are scientists that want to do it. And I happen to believe one of the reasons the scientific community ganged up on people against me who were suggesting this came from the lab, and they were unrealistically,

scientifically saying it came from the wet market, all right, like with the proctin origin paper, was their real agenda was to protect gain-of-function research. They didn't want the federal government coming in to regulate science. If it was concluded that this pandemic, one of the biggest pandemics we had in a hundred years, came from science, what's the public response? It's going to be regulation. And the last thing the scientific community wants us to be regulated. There was a huge contention about, you know, one scientist publishing the recipe about avian. And I argued against it when they came up with it and showed the four

amino acids that have to change. I suggested to people, including Fauci, that this paper should not be published. The gentleman that did it was actually on one of my boards, and I didn't think it should be published. I lost that debate. Everyone argued this is science. We've got to publish it. And unfortunately, it was published. I think it's, you know, I hadn't to believe in God, I think it's a miracle that someone hasn't already used it. Now, that virus has already been created, is in freezers. You know, I'm big worried and talk about it in my book about the next pandemic and the bird flu pandemic.

I don't think it's probably going to come from nature because as it, as we've learned with SARS and MERS, they still haven't learned how to go efficiently human to human. And right now, bird flu can't go efficiently human to human. It has long learned how to go elephant seal to elephant seal. but it hasn't learned how to go human to human or mammal to mammal and it's with those four amino acids that have to change exactly in a certain way you know it may never happen or it may take hundreds of years well except but but in research i can create it all right and i can create it within a month and and actually i think the virus has already been created and is in

freezers and if that virus gets out you'll have a global pandemic okay I mean, you're the perfect person for me to ask this. And so we know from their writings and a whole range of information that China is developing bio-weapons, is interested in using viruses, is interested in using ethnic-specific vectors. It's a high priority for them. I don't know what stage that development's in. It's obviously highly classified. That's just the reality we face.

What does the biodefense look like? right? Because really we're talking about the same thing, right? Whether it's a bioweapon or whether it's this thing out of a freezer. So for me, the first thing, and again, an important thing that I hope your readers will read my book that they'll get is me making the argument that biosecurity is one of not the most serious national security threat that we face. And I will argue that we ought to have a response proportional to the threat. Now, traditional security concerns, China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran, we've built an $800 billion a year defense program

and a huge defense industry which has both public and private components with bases all around the world to anticipate what our defense needs would be. but most importantly, we've built a private sector network that meets our defense needs, the defense contractors. If it wasn't for the defense contractors, we wouldn't have a defense capability. I argue that we need to do the same thing for biosecurity. And what does that mean? Well, it means we need to develop a network of defense contractors that rather than focus on

airplanes and missiles and bullets and bombs. Their focus on antivirals, vaccines, diagnostics, protective gear, certain targeted medical equipment that we can anticipate we need. Now, what I'll argue, and I argue in the book, is, you know, the Defense Department's got their hands full. You know, they've got enough on their plate, even with adding cybersecurity, which was probably more than they wanted. Okay. So where would we do this? I'm sort of a small government guy.

I don't want to start a whole new apparatus. So when I looked at it and went to see the Oppenheimer movie for the second time, I said, you know, why don't we put this in the Department of Energy? They've got six really good labs, biology labs, and one of the reasons the energy department came to the conclusion that this lab, this virus, came from the lab. this virus came from the lab, is they used their own scientists to do the analogy,

as did the FBI, whereas the other groups all used NIH advisors, okay? Fascinating. Okay. So they have an independent system of . When I met with the head guy from mass destruction for the FBI, he was a great scientist. And he had a whole team of scientists.

They were FBI. I didn't know the FBI had a mass destruction group, but they do, all right? And of course, the Energy Department does. and they've been in this area for a long time because that's where we put all of our nuclear. So they have a great experience in looking at weapons of mass destruction.

They have a lab base. They could manage the extramural contracts with the private sector. And we could go ahead and start building a private sector, if you will, biosecurity defense contract network of companies that have, you know, 10-year, 20-year funding

to build the capacity for the United States to have what it would need in case of a, biosecurity threat. That's what I want to see happen. If the bird flu became transmissible human to human, and again, my own view, facilitated by science, not by nature, it would be catastrophic. I talk about bird flu as the great pandemic. I talk about COVID as a minor pandemic. And when I try to convince people to listen that this is biosecurity implications, I hope people think back a little bit about how COVID changed the way of life in America, right?

And its long-term consequences are significant. I mean, the closing of our schools and the damage that that did to kids K-12, some of those kids are never going to get out of it. Okay. So this is what I'm talking about, about building proportional to the threat. And we can argue what that is, is it a $200 billion a year program, is it a $50 billion year program, it's a $250 billion, but it's building the capacity

to have enormous redundancy in antibial drug development and investing in platform technology. I mean, I have one platform technology that I've been involved in that's pretty exciting. It's like the MRNA technology, but I don't think the MRNA technology ultimately is going to be in the position of preventive vaccine development,

but I do think it's going to be central to therapeutics all right and and there are ways to develop therapeutics you know silencing RNAs that you can do using that technology the beautiful thing about the MRI technology if you convert it into therapeutics is right now one of our biggest problems in therapeutics is we don't have active pharmaceutical ingredient you got to go to China or India to get it correct mostly China correct but if you learn how to to capitalize on the form of the MRNA technology for therapeutics, all you need is four nucleotides. They're highly stable. You can put them on the shelf.

You can stockpile them. You need a couple enzymes. You can stop by it. In other words, we no longer have a dependency on active pharmaceutical goods. I'm glad we're looking at rare metals and doing stuff, but you know, you're looking at a 20-year effort for the United States to position itself where it needs to be. in active pharmaceutical ingredients. And right now, if you look at the two suppliers that we can use, one's China and one's

India. When you go to India, you find out India gets 80% of their active pharmaceuticals from China. From China. That's right. And China is not the country that we want to be dependent upon for our biosecurity needs. Explain to me what exactly you mean by using the MRNA platform for therapeutics as a solution to the fact that so many of these medical precursor and ingredients actually ultimately come from China,

which creates this bio-warfare opportunity, as well as just supply chain risk. So theoretically, if you know the sequence of what you want to make. Like the actual compound that you want to make. The actual compound you want to make. You know the amino acid sequence of that compound. Theoretically, you could make an MRNA,

that could manufacture that sequence just like now you're okay just like you manufactured the spike protein all right just you're not putting it in the body you're making it you're cleaning it up and now you have it you can do it you can make it up you can put it where you can put it in a biological systems that you make it or you could put it into the body and let the body make it okay you can also make silencing nucleic acids. So in other words, if I knew there was an RNA virus that you had, I could create a opposite, a silencing RNA. And I personally didn't believe this was going to work. My father was

a scientist at NIH back in the 40s and early 50s. He died in 1956. My father really believed RNA was really important. He was working on the genetic code. trying to figure it out. Three people from his group went on later to get the Nobel Prize in Medicine separately. Separately. So these people really knew how to play science at the highest level. Some colleagues of mine had developed a MRNA technology to treat COVID.

And they did it in ferrets, right? And I was convinced it wasn't going to work but they asked me to give some advice so you know I always like to to do things that I don't necessarily think going to work because I learned something and lo and behold they they were able to and take ferrets that were infected with COVID give them this MRI and they cured the ferrets the advantage of this is that they could take another virus Ebola or Marburg and they could do the same thing it's just different sequences what was the process how did that work

For this one, this Ferrett's experiment was developing an MRNA, which was the opposite of the actual COVID RNA. So it acted as a silencing RNA. So it just basically attached to the RNA neutralizing it. And then you got double-stranded RNA and what the body does is it digested. Because the body doesn't like double-stranded RNA. They think that that's a foreign invader, right? But you could, even though they didn't do this, you could go a step further.

and have that RNA actually code for a product. Doesn't have to code for an RNA, right? Or if you want to even go further, you know, you could code these products so you develop different antibodies. I mean, the potential of using molecular technology therapeutically is huge. Now, you know, modern is already moving on the cancer scene and they've got some products that are coming. I don't think they're going to be in the preventive vaccine area

because I think it's a risk-benefit ratio. Well, precisely. You're giving it to healthy people versus people who are very sick. But if you're sick and you've got AML leukemia, you're going to take more risk, all right? So I think the MRNA technology, because I do think there's risk with it, right, is going to be aligned with therapeutics. all right therapeutics also from a therapeutic point of view I think it helps us who are

struggling with active pharmaceutical ingredients you know and particularly if you take the step of using the procedure to actually have the MRI given to people to create the product now you see that I've solved a couple problems because normally what I have to do is I have to get the active pharmaceutical ingredient you have to deliver it I got a figure out how to give it to you, get the right pharmaconetics in you, and then see how, you know, do the trials to see how it works. This way, all I have to do is give you the product. You'll make the product. Now, you can see there are a lot of issues in learning how to regulate how much you make and all that other stuff. We talked about that with the MRI vaccines. But I think

this is an enormously exciting technology for therapeutics. I don't see the risk-benefit ratio holding up over time for prevention. I also see if there's a limited amount of our nucleotides that we need, I think if society has to decide whether we use them for therapeutics or prevention, we're going to use them for therapeutics. One more question as we finish up, and I want to go back to something I ask, but I don't think we finish the discussion.

And it had to do with, you know, there's some hundreds of thousands, at least, of vaccine injured people in America through these COVID vaccines, and they're not getting a lot of help. In fact, and still, many of them, some of them may not even understand that that's what's happened, because there's that level of, let's call it, gaslighting, to be fair, that happened around this whole issue in the past. And some know, but are not getting helped or being told they have functional disorder or something like this. How do we get them help? Yeah, it's complicated.

I mean, I think first and foremost is honest transparency in acknowledging the vaccine injury does occur. All right. And I think one of the advantages is that the FDA is looking at this again in the recent announcement with the death of these children, which is tragic. Because now you say, well, maybe it's 10 children that died or another report they were looking at 26 and there may be more. Then you realize if you listen to me, the children probably didn't need to be valid. vaccinated. And that's, it's tragic, right? So, but first to acknowledge of vaccine injuries real. You know, I really would like to see the MRNA vaccine use curtailed. And personally, I'd like to see it eliminated, all right, because I don't, I think there's too many unknowns.

It was an emergency effort that we did at a time of emergency. I think the protein vaccine is a better option. And I'm disappointed that it has not been more aggressively embraced by the past administration. But I do think, again, I'm going to come back to I have a lot of confidence in Marty McCarrie and the team he's putting together. And they're not afraid to ask questions that other people, you know, refuse to ask. And I think we're going to see more and more data coming out of the FDA that's going to help us get greater clarity on how we want to use these vaccines in the future. And I think hopefully it will lead to our recognition that vaccine companies also have to be subject to product liability.

Right. And we have to figure that out because you don't want to have it to go the way of diving boards at swimming pools. where there are no more diving boards that swimming fools. You know, we need vaccines, so we've got to figure out the balance there. You know, I don't think we really monitor vaccine injury in general to the degree we should. I mean, I'm a little countercultural again. When I've been involved in trying to think of how to improve our public health system, I've always felt that the FDA ought to be moved into the Department of Commerce for

pre-approval. And then the FDA that we have now should still do post-safety, but they should be separated. When you have the same group looking at the safety of the same products that they approved, I think there's a conflict. So I would rather have a commercial group looking at the development of medical devices and pharmaceuticals that accelerate the commercial aspect to try to improve the human condition and then take the traditional point that the FDA had for post-marketing safety and efficacy have that job over there so they're separated I think it just makes better sense when you have the same when you have me approving the drug and then you're asking me to

decide did the drug really hurt you or not I think there's an intrinsic conflict It's a paralytic conflict. Things take longer than they should. It should be separated. So now the real final question. My contention would probably be based on my limited knowledge at this point, but significant, that possibly the best means of biodefense, and not just biodefense,

but more broadly, dealing with the reality that there's infectious disease, and airborne infectious disease in the world and so forth. It's just having a healthier population, having people have their vitamin D levels significant. And just, is that the right way to view things? There's this Maha movement that we're having, Make America healthy people.

I'm a big advocate. So Trump, you know, what asked me, you know, and when I did that original analysis in February 2020, CDC presented me the data what they thought was going to happen. And it was a very difficult time for me, and even my wife, it's in the book where we sat that night and wondered whether we'd be alive in September, because CDC predicted 2.2 million Americans were going to die in the next eight months. Yes.

Okay. It was pretty rough, okay? you know we did lose 1.2 million you know and that's a lot of people but then you look at another country like Taiwan and they had much much much less mortality so why if we're such an advanced medical country and we are even though we had a lot to learn about COVID and the reason is is because COVID exploited the reality that we're not a healthy nation. This is why I'm really excited about Secretary Kennedy and making America healthy again.

I mean, the fact that you realize that 20 to 30 percent of young adolescents are obese, 50 percent of the American population, 77 percent of young kids can't pass a military medical exam, we're not a healthy nation, and it's a big problem. So if your argument is what's something that we can do that makes a lot of sense, yeah, get healthier and how do we do that i think kennedy's on to something with the processed foods i think getting uh toxins and chemicals out of our food making sure that what we put in our bodies are are you know are healthy and not harmful you know i think you know there's a lot of issues i also worry about drug use disorder and depression um that really we could address more

effectively to become more healthy i do think bringing exercise back into the real world and the effort to bring his uncle's physical fitness thing back into the mainstream so people kids want to get their patch on their shirt so there's no doubt we can become a healthier nation we're not a healthy nation and and we have to figure out better incentives for health because we don't have it I am a big advocate I've been a doctor now you know what you know for 40 almost 50 years and in that time I I've been part of, if you have to want to be honest,

I've been part of a disease system, you know, that the- As opposed to a health system. As opposed to a health system. And we need to build a health system. And we need to move towards where my compensation as a doctor is, I'm compensated not for making sure I treat your disease, I'm compensated for keeping you healthy. All right?

We have to move to a value-based health system. system. Jay Bhattacharya is another guy I have a lot of respect for. You know, he's talking about the National Institutes of Health. We've spent hundreds of billions of dollars at the NIH, and all that's happened since the 1950s is we've become a sicker nation. You would think that the byproduct of that investment in research in biomedical research ought to be health. We should become a healthier nation and I think you'll see Jay starting looking at that don't don't feel good because you've published a lot of papers in a lot of journals feel good about making America healthy again I think Kennedy's going to

start seeing some progress particularly on obesity and and and and and really look at trying to make some progress in chronic disease I wrote an op-ed in the Chicago Tribune two Fridays ago where I made an appeal, and I'm gonna make that appeal to HHS, that we need to be more aggressive about early diagnosis and early intervention for Alzheimer's disease.

I mean, we'll talk about a terrible disease with an enormous burden. Well, we've got a new FDA approved way to approve this early diagnosis with Taup. And the drugs do seem to work in symptomatic Alzheimer's. We need, the trials are going on now for early stage, one and stage two, and my gut instincts is they're going to work better if you treat really

stage one and stage two than if you wait until stage three, it's no different than when we started treating AIDS. If you waited the people got AIDS, it was a lot harder to get them treated than if we started treating them when they had early HIV infection. So I think there's a real opportunity to commit ourselves to building a health system, value-based health care. You know, right now I get paid for how many minutes I spend with you. No, don't pay me for how many minutes I spend with you. Compensate me for if I'm a primary care doctor and you're my patient and at the end of a year I got your body weight ideal, your blood pressure is in good shape, your A1C's down, your lipids are good.

Then you should give me a bonus for that and you should give you a bonus for being. healthy, you know. So we've got it all wrong. I don't think I've always argued we don't have a health system in this country. We have a disease system. And Kennedy is going to start changing it into a health system. That's why I'm a big advocate of his, you know, a lot of, I wish people would give him the benefit of the doubt, wish the media would give him the benefit of the doubt. Let this guy try to improve the health of America and get on the train with him. Well, Dr. Robert Redfield, it's such a pleasure to have had you on. Thanks a lot. Glad to be here.

Thank you all for joining Dr. Robert Redfield and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Yanya Kellick.