The Chris Cuomo Project - Ex-CDC Chief Dr. Robert Redfield Reveals COVID-19 Truths

Episode Date: June 4, 2024

Chris Cuomo speaks with Dr. Robert Redfield, former head of the CDC, about the origins and ongoing impact of COVID-19, including the role of U.S. and Chinese research in the virus’s development. Redfield shares insights on government overreach, the effectiveness and side effects of vaccines, and the reality of long COVID, emphasizing the need for transparency and a comprehensive review of the pandemic response. Follow and subscribe to The Chris Cuomo Project on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube for new episodes every Tuesday and Thursday: https://linktr.ee/cuomoproject Join Chris Ad-Free On Substack: http://thechriscuomoproject.substack.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Is COVID just like a cold? Is COVID gone? Is long COVID real? Was ivermectin the solution? Was it kept from you? Was the vaccine a mistake?

Is the vaccine poison? All these questions are out there and you rarely get answers that aren't self-serving to help someone build a conspiracy or a platform, or just ignoring them as nonsense. I deal with both all the time. Dr. Robert Redfield knows the answers, and when he doesn't, he explains why he doesn't. He was the head of CDC for Trump during the pandemic in the early stages.

He's been one of the top virologists in this country forever. He's one of the pioneers in helping us deal with what was dismissed as the gay man's disease back in the 80s. And of course then became HIV and AIDS and his work was pivotal. He's still working.

He's now in a clinic that's all about long COVID, something that the government doesn't even really discuss as a reality. That's what we're doing. I'm Chris Cuomo. This is the Chris Cuomo Project. Thank you for subscribing and following. We have the man who was in the middle, understanding what's going on, his take on Tony Fauci,

on where there's criticism and where there shouldn't be, on the questions that need to be answered and everything that's being ignored. And here's the headline, COVID isn't over. Not just the 150 that we're losing a day still to this disease, but it's changing and it's making us sick and it's going to keep doing that and we're not even talking about it. So what do you say? We got Dr. Robert Redfield. Let's get after it. Support for the Chris Cuomo project comes from AG1. If you're a long time listener, you know I have had AG1 as part of my game for many years.

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only please play responsibly. If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact con ex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Jedi are being murdered. Now streaming, Star Wars Returns, only on Disney Plus. I didn't do it. Believe me. She was my student.

Let me be the one to bring her in. Now she is a student of the dark side. An acolyte. Star Wars The Acolyte, new episodes Tuesdays, only on Disney Plus. All right, let's begin at the beginning. The Acolyte, new episodes Tuesdays, only on Disney Plus. All right, let's begin at the beginning. The United States created the novel coronavirus that we just suffered through, yes or no? I would say that they didn't create it,

but they contributed to the research that led to it. And that's to say is that the US government was very involved in funding the Chinese lab that did this research. And there was US investigators that were very involved working collaboratively with that lab. And it doesn't make scientific sense to me that this COVID virus evolved from a bat to some animal

that we've yet to find and then went into humans. I always remind people that when coronavirus has go from bats into an animal to humans, the one thing SARS and MERS have in common when they finally got to humans, they didn't know how to efficiently transmit human to human. When you look at the SARS outbreak, 2000, 2003, we had less than a thousand cases. And even today, now many years later,

we have less than 10,000 cases, same thing with MERS. So when COVID started, it immediately was one of the most infectious viruses that we ever had for humans. So I'm on the point of view as a virologist, the only way that really happened was that virus had to be educated in how to infect humans. And we know that the lab in Wuhan published a paper in 2014-15 where they said they were successful in teaching coronavirus to bind to the H2 receptor,

human receptor, which was able then to infect humanized mice very efficiently. So and then when you look at that work, it turns out that USAID, NIAID, the Defense Department, and the State Department all funded that laboratory. In addition, one of the major colleagues that worked with that laboratory was the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. And so, clearly the U.S. was involved. Some people who have dumped on me, you know, initially suggesting that I was somehow anti-Asian or something, because I suggested scientifically I believe this virus came from the Wuhan lab, I've always said that I'm not blaming the Chinese per se, because this was a work that was done by the Chinese and

the United States which I think led to this pandemic. Why not blame the Chinese? They won't let us look in the lab, they won't cooperate with us. They allow this idea that maybe it came from the wet market to be as plausible as it being a lab leak directly, why not put more blame on them? Yeah, I think it's really important.

There's enormous culpability by the Chinese and the Chinese government. I was just saying for the lab work itself and the education of this virus to infect humans, I hold China enormously accountable by not adhering to the international health regulations. They didn't adhere to it. They were supposed to allow people like me and the CDC and the WHO to go in within 48 hours and help figure this out. They didn't do it. I even had President Trump call the President of China to allow my team to go in, and that

didn't happen. You know, Pompeo called his counterpart, Azar called his counterpart. They just, they roadblocked us from coming in. They roadblocked the WHO from coming in. All of that, there's a culpability there. They were not transparent. Secondly, I think they were very aggressive in

setting up a Roost hypothesis, which was the lab leak and the wet market. I told you when I called George Gao, who was the head of the Chinese CDC, my counterpart on New Year's Eve in 2019, George told me he had 27 cases of a new respiratory illness that wasn't flu and SARS. I asked him what his case definition was,

and he said, Bob, it's people with an undefined respiratory illness. It's not SARS and not flu that came from the wet market. I said, well, George, by definition, then everybody came from the wet market. Why are you trying to do this? I said, just like when the AIDS epidemic started, people used to say gay and drug users or patients and hemophiliacs.

Nobody just said looking for the infection as I did, generically, and just people that were sexually active. So I asked him to go out and look outside of the wet market, which he did, and about two to three days later, he called me and he said, Bob, we have hundreds of cases and it has nothing to do with the wet market. So the wet market was a roost, which again, I feel that again,

there's culpability there and not being transparent about the thing. So don't misinterpret me when I said I'm not blaming them in isolation for the creation of the virus, but I am holding them accountable for their lack of transparency, the lack of adherent to the international health regulations, their entire response.

We now know that the transmission of COVID-19 probably began between August and October of 2019. Clearly, they knew it. They were well-informed. In the middle of September, the Wuhan lab had three things happened to it that raise high suspicion. One was they changed the leadership of the lab from

the civilian leadership to the military leadership. It was a dual-use lab, so it went under military leadership. They deleted all the sequence data that they had on historical coronaviruses, which is highly irregular. Then they put a contract in for a new ventilation system. That's about the same time there's reports.

Some of the stuff is still classified, hopefully eventually it'll all be declassified. But there clearly was some reports that made it out to the lay press that there was new infections being noted in late September in the area. By October, it was pretty widespread because they had the military games in Wuhan in October. And again, it's very odd that the Wuhan government didn't allow any spectators to those games, which tells you something was going on at that time. So yes, they're highly culpable,

and I do think they should be held accountable, because as a consequence of their lack of transparency, in probably August, September, October, November, December, January, the world lost the jumpstart in being able to respond to this. So that's a distinction between blaming them in isolation for the research,

which I think was a cooperative situation where I've always said that yes, their scientists were involved, yes, the US was involved. And truthfully, I think the European scientists also have some accountability there because they were the big advocates of gain of functional research in the first place which I

Believe led to the coven pandemic. Do you believe? the nuance explanation of People from the US government who's told Congress nothing that we funded could have become COVID-19 we weren't working on anything that could become that. I think, again, it comes down to nuance. If you read specifically the research grant that NIAID funded, and I haven't been able to read all the other

what USAID funded and what DOD funded and State Department funded. I just know they funded stuff. But the NIAD grant, that exact grant, that exact grant did not necessarily lead to COVID. But that's not to say that the broad funding of this laboratory didn't lead to the COVID pandemic. As Peter Dysick testified a couple weeks ago before Congress,

when he was pushed in a corner, he admitted that there were thousands of viruses in their lab. Right. That they have no idea what they are. Right. So people like Tony and others are right, if they say the exact virus that they said in the grant, and that sequence is not the virus

that caused COVID. But that's not to say one of the other thousands of viruses that they had wasn't the progenitor of it. And it's not to say that they didn't use money that came in from USAID, the State Department, DOD, or NAID and NIH to actually do that research. Do you believe that COVID-19 was developed to kill as many people as possible and make us as sick as possible? No, I believe, and this is again, my own personal belief. I like to try to state it as facts,

whereas I think a lot of my virology is very factual. When I tell people, there's absolutely no evidence for spillover. There's a lot of people that had the opinion that it came from spillover, but there's no real evidence if you really want to play hardball as a, as a, you know, and a reporter investigator that you are, there is evidence for lab leak. All right. And you can argue, but, but there's a lot of opinions for spillover.

Spillover meaning the wet market. Well, spillover, the wet market or an animal. It's an opinion, there's no data. Right. Right, we have thousands and thousands of animals, no data, it's just opinion. Now it gets me mad when people say, all the evidence is, no, what evidence?

Right. And I ask reporters like you to come back and say, what evidence? Just list me the evidence, because there isn't. But when you ask me, here's what I think. I think this lab was involved in dual use research. I think this lab was trying to develop a vaccine vector that could be used to vaccinate the Chinese military and the Chinese people,

and maybe the world in general. In order for the vector to be useful, it needed certain characteristics. One, it would be a lot better if it could be spread by aerosol or droplets. It's a lot easier. It's hard to find enough needles to vaccinate billions of people, right? But if you can just spread it around by sneezing, you got something that could maybe be a vaccine.

It also, and therefore making it more transmissible, which we now know it is, it is interesting, Chris, if you look critically, and I've always wondered why this wasn't pointed out in some of the interviews, if you look at COVID-19, which my critics say came from bats to some animal and then to people and then became very infectious in people, when you know, even though it's not like SARS or MERS because it couldn't do efficient transmission in people. But when you look at that virus, now it's in people and take COVID-19 and ask the question,

can it infect bats? It's very inefficient in infecting bats. How'd that happen? All right? Well, it was engineered to change its receptor. So its preferred receptor was the human receptor. The second thing, if you're gonna make a vaccine vector, you know, for people, you wanna make people not sick.

So if you look at the virus, there's pretty good evidence that it also has been manipulated to knock out what we call the interferon response element. So when you get a cold or flu and you ache all over the place, that's not the flu virus doing it, that's your interferon response element. They knocked out the interferon response element.

The other thing they did, and there's some really good scientists at Livermore that have pointed all this out. There was a congressional hearing a couple years ago where they presented a group of virologists it wasn't well reported on, but it was a very good hearing on the virology of this virus. They also modified what we call the immunodominant response,

so that when you get this virus, your body doesn't orchestrate an immunodominant response that would make it impossible to use the virus again. So this virus could be given over and over and over again. So I think it was developed as part of a vaccine program, which was trying to develop vector, which could be then used for multiple antigens. So if you wanted to vaccinate the population against

this disease or this disease or this disease, all you had to do is insert that antigen into this vector. I think personally, that's what they were trying to do. I can't prove it, that's just an opinion. But I think that's what they were doing, as opposed to trying to create a virus. If you want to look at it from a military perspective, and I spent 23 years at

Walter Reed in the US Army Medical Corps, the target population for, let's say, a bio weapon agent would not be those of us over 65. Right, you wanna get the young ones. The target population would be 18 to 30 years. Right. And this virus doesn't do anything really to those people in general.

I mean, some people get sick, but in general. So I really think it was a vaccine vector, part of a major vaccine vector program. I think the problem with what I call scientific arrogance about all the people that were doing this work, they never really realized that they were kind of unlikely being able to contain a respiratory pathogen, particularly in the laboratory situation that they were doing it.

I've mentioned to people when I was CDC director, one of the most difficult decisions I made was I shut down Fort Detrick. I had been at Walter Reed for many years. I'd worked at Fort Detrick. These are my colleagues. But CDC normally inspects these laboratories for their biocontainment adherence.

They had some problems with the inspection. Then the follow-up inspections, they had the same problems. I felt it was just inappropriate for them to go on doing those experiments, particularly for the people of Frederick and the area around there, because they had some very

severe laps in their biocontainment strategy, and I shut them down. They were shut down for about six months. So I think there was a lot of arrogance here. We know that the containment in this laboratory was not optimal. But I will also say, and maybe we'll talk about it later,

I'm very worried about gain-of-function research that's being done in a lot of university labs that don't have the containment to do it. One sidestep into just your personal experience and your opinion, and then I wanna get back into what you know, as a matter of fact. You've known Tony Fauci a long time. You guys have worked on a lot of very serious things

for a long time. You guys have worked on a lot of very serious things for a long time. The idea that he was manipulating grants to make himself very wealthy and that that's what this was all about. Now, I know as a matter of fact, nobody has shown that and the guy has to put out an income statement every year. But it's certainly jet fuel on social media about Tony Fauci and your experience with him. Has he ever been money motivated or someone who you were suspicious of being bought off? I don't think there's any negative motivation at all by Fauci. Fauci is a friend. He may disagree with me.

And again, it would be nice if we could have disagreements and still be friends. He's obviously disagreed with me on a number of things when it related to COVID. I think Tony Fauci's motivation was strictly that he believed what he was doing was protecting science, not protecting Tony Fauci. Him and Collins wanted to protect science.

They were worried that if there was suspicion, I think, of gain of function of the lab, then gain of function research, that that may hurt science. Now, I argued with Tony that by not being transparent, I wanted him to do an aggressive investigation of both hypotheses and to do it in a very transparent, open, aggressive way, and bring in the people that are strong advocates for both hypotheses to argue it in a very transparent, open, aggressive way, and bring in the people that are strong advocates for both hypotheses to argue them in a public display, rather than unfortunately what him and Collins did was very rapidly in February,

they kind of coalesced everybody to go with the spillover, and people like myself were sort of pushed to the side, and we had a lot of bad articles written about us, could tell them, calling us that we were racist and stuff like that. We had death threats, all that, just because we raised the hypothesis. Now, I don't think Tony did any of that, but I argued with Tony that he was gonna hurt science

if he wasn't transparent about all of this aggressively. But no, I don't think there was any ill-intended motivation. I have a lot of respect for Fauci. I think he could have been more transparent than it appears he's been on this issue. But I think his motivation was not personal. I really do believe that it was a motivation to protect science.

I think you remember one of his quotes that I think he was a little over the top when he said, if you disagree with me, you disagree with science. I don't think he really meant that. I just, that's how much he felt that he was such a standard bearer for science. And so did Collins.

And they thought people like me that were questioning whether it came from the laboratory that may be negative to the science they wanted to protect. And that science was of course, the gain of function research that they felt very strongly needed to go forward, not for their own financial reasons, not for their own personal glory. They wanted that research to go forward because they believe that it's important, ultimately, in preparing and being able to improve countermeasures to help the human condition. I disagree with him. I think we don't need the gain-of-function

research to do that, but I don't question his motivation. Is it true that Obama outlawed gain-of-function and that then people and government agencies found a sneaky way to get it done around the restriction in another country? There's a couple things about the guy. Obama administration clearly did make it so that we could not do gain of function research in the United States. Tony knows more of this even than I, because he was in people don't know this, but in 2002, 2003, the mission of biodefense that we had in our nation, which was in the US Army in a Fort Detrick, was transferred to NIH under the direction of Tony Fauci.

So he got somewhere like $40 billion to basically manage our biodefense program. I always argued that NIH had a different mission. I didn't see their mission was biodefense. I saw their mission was science to help improve the human condition. And I thought the Defense Department should stay in charge of the biodefense. But that all changed in 2002.

I think most people don't know it. And I think it was a big mistake. But I think that, I'm trying to remember exactly your question now. I got off on a tangent there. The question is that it was made illegal and that Tony or somebody said, let's go do it in other countries and nobody will know. So what they did was they set up a series of committees that were allowed to grant waivers

and approve it. And this is some of the controversy around the Wuhan lab research because it apparently never went through that committee. All right. And people argue a lot of it with semantics. I do disagree with Tony pretty aggressively. In and his testimony with Rand Paul, when he says that he's never done gain-of-function research,

and he's just never done gain-of-function research. What they did was, again, I think, a stain on them because of the lack of transparency. Tony, different groups, and he has a lot of influence on the groups, decided they had commissions to define gain of function research since Obama had outlawed it. So the groups that came together to define it came up with a definition which I don't personally agree with. But by the letter of the law, Tony can say that the Wuhan lab, even if it was research

that was done, it didn't meet the letter of the law of gain of function. What Tony did was the groups changed, and Tony didn't do this, but it's the groups that he influenced did it, they changed the definition of gain of function research. So if you and I take a pathogen like COVID-19, which is not pathogenic for humans, and we teach it to be pathogenic for humans, that's not gain of function research. Because in order to be gain of function research

by their definition, National Academy and others, you have to start with a pathogen that's already pathogenic for humans and make it more pathogenic for humans. Well, I think that's... It's ludicrous. I get it. But on the letter of the law, when Tony tells Rand Paul he didn't do gain-of-function research

by the definition that is accepted in science, he's telling the truth. Because the definition that science said, if the pathogen wasn't a human pathogen, no matter how pathogenic you made it for man, it doesn't meet their definition. I think it's artificial, it's misleading, and so for me, if you take a pathogen that's non-pathogenic for humans and make it pathogenic for humans, that's gain of function. Do you know the man that came up in the recent hearings who had all the emails saying he was trying to hide

his emails and stuff like that? Yeah, Moran. My understanding is that- I worked with him many years ago when I was at Walter Reed. He was a dengue expert in Hawaii. I knew him well back then, and he was actually at CDC for a while before my time. And then he was Tony's chief advisor for over 20 years.

So I know him, I know him. I am told, and you can please, you're gonna have better perspective, that his title was given to him as often happens in government where they can't pay you what you're worth, but they'll give you a title that makes it something more appealing to you to do.

And that he was never Fauci's main guy. He didn't work on any of the stuff that mattered around the pandemic with Tony. And people don't understand why he was saying the things he was saying about hiding and secrecy because he wasn't involved in anything that would have mattered. That I can't answer, Chris.

I just don't know. The only thing I can say about his relationship with Fauci that I know is what was in those emails, so I don't know anything that wasn't in public. I mean, the email, the emails were pretty damning, right? But, but I, I don't know. I don't know at all. I will say it's clear that Moran's had a very good personal

relationship with Peter Dasic. Right. Which, which is problematic. It's clear that Moran's had a very good personal relationship with Peter Dasik. Right. Which is problematic. This ad was expressly recorded to create a sense of simplicity. Just a few simple sounds. No complexity. Hmm. Like neutral.

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but this is the state of play. COVID ain't shit, Doc. It's just a cold and we didn't need to do any of these things. And it would have been just fine. This was all government overreach. And what Trump is most criticized for is actually a virtue. That when he said, ah, it'll be gone in a couple of weeks, this is no big deal. That he's blamed for underestimating something that needed to be jumped on that you wanted

to jump on and others wanted to jump on and others wanted to jump on, but Trump was actually right and you guys are worry warts and you made it all worse. COVID-19 is no big deal. So a couple things first related to President Trump. I just, from my vantage point, he took this extremely serious because when I went into his, the Oval Office on January 31st and said to him that I felt we needed to immediately stop all air travel to and from China and the secretary of treasury was there and thought I was off my rocker, right? And chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney was there.

And I think that was the only ones in the room. Trump looked at me and asked me a couple questions on why I felt that from a public health perspective. I articulated my rationale, and then he just said, if the CDC director says we need to shut down all air travel to and from China, contrary to what the Secretary of Treasury said, he said Mick would're shutting it down.

That's a pretty aggressive step for someone who didn't take this seriously. At that time, we had probably less than 20 cases in America, no deaths, and yet he shut down all our travel. And when I had him shut down all travel to and from Europe, it was very similar. So those are serious things. I do think he did try to keep the American public from overreacting. All right. And some people are critical of that. Now to your other step, was there overreach by the government? I think there's no question about it. I might even argue it got worse in the Biden administration. For example, absolutely never should have mandated vaccines,

period. Terrible decision. These vaccines do not prevent infection. They prevent serious illness and death, and those of us at risk for serious illness and death. And that's predominantly those with significant comorbidities and over the age of 60 or over the age of 65. So the rationale for mandating vaccine for healthy firefighters and policemen in the

military, you know, and hospital workers was emotional, teachers was emotional. It wasn't, and it shouldn't have happened. We should have always honored individual choice on those vaccines. Secondly, we should have given more credit, and I tried to argue for this, that immunity from infection has value too, to say that it was of no value. And we had people who lost their jobs

who were immune by infection, short-term immunity, but they had antibodies directed against this virus from natural infection, and they lost their jobs because they didn't get vaccinated. Overreach. The lockdowns, overreach. I was more in the Pence category, and I didn't get to meet with the president to discuss the lockdowns when they happened. It was Fauci and Birx and the president,

and probably the vice president, that had the meeting to discuss that when they went ahead with the lockdowns. I was more of the 15 days to slow the spread and suggested that we take each type of activity that we want to do and try to learn how to modify it in a way so we continue to do it in a safe, responsible, and effective way. I was very much against closing schools. I thought the kids who were probably safer in schools,

most kids were getting infected from the community and from the dinner table, not from the school. A lot of that was emotionalism with teachers. We only had a few states that listened to that point of view, Arkansas, North Dakota, most of them shut down schools. So all of that is no doubt government overreach. And I think a big mistake and we paid a big price for it. And, you know, I'm not sure people will accept responsibility to the people that really pushed it because it was unfortunate, it was emotional. There was also very little pushback at the time.

I'm not saying that you didn't disagree and there weren't internal disagreements, but what my beef was, was that, and I never included you in this, and you know that I've always seen you as a resource, doesn't matter who agrees, who disagrees, I just want intelligent voices at the table, giving people food for thought.

There were people who loved that Trump was able to manipulate the system to get Operation Warp speed through. And Republican politicians lauding his efforts, and this is gonna be great. And we had Kamala Harris infamously say, I'm not gonna take any Trump vaccine. Remember that? And then those politics,

not blaming any one person, but then all of a sudden Biden comes in and all the same people that were celebrating Operation Warp Speed suddenly said they wouldn't take the vaccine. And it was, you know, my body, my choice, and people who had bragged about getting vaccinated and getting their wives and kids vaccinated,

all of a sudden were saying, well, I don't know. I don't know whether we should be, the only thing that changed was who was empowered, doc. What am I missing? Well, a couple of things. First, I want to give President Trump a lot of credit for Operation Warp Speed. You know, you know, I've always tried to be honest

that I think there was some major mistakes in the vaccines. They should have never been mandated. I also felt that people should have been more honest about the fact that there were side effects to those vaccines and some people were actually harmed. The other thing I thought there should be more honesty about the fact that the vaccines don't protect against infection.

I remember Biden saying, this is a epidemic of the unvaccinated. When I was Hogan's chief public health advisor in Maryland after I left CDC, I was saying, wait a minute, two thirds of the people that I'm seeing infected in Maryland have been vaccinated. So these vaccines don't last, they don't pretend infection. What they did do is they prevented serious illness and death.

And where there was a big mistake, I think by a lot of the people is they didn't distinguish. Birx and I felt that these vaccines really ought to be prioritized for nursing homes, prioritize for assisted living, prioritized for the elderly over 65. And yet, that's not what happened. There was this, if everyone had to get vaccinated.

So I think that's- Was it because of big pharma? That's unfortunate. Yeah, I think there definitely was a huge influence by the pharmaceutical industry, Pfizer and Moderna. I think you did, you know, you pointed out that there was a big push. I think where the Republicans, I think, started getting upset about the vaccine more and more was the issue of mandating the vaccine.

Right. Mandating it. The Democrats seen, the Biden administration seemed to really push the vaccine. I remember I left office in January 20th and January 21st. McLean was on the news. I never usually got upset about it. I learned how to just let these things go. But McLean got on the news and he said,

when we turned over the program to him, we left him a mess. That was his quote, a mess. That he was rapidly, that they were going to solve the problem and get up to vaccinate a million people a day. Well, when Pence and I left on, I think it was on the 19th of January,

we were already vaccinated a million a day. All right, so it was just, there just wasn't honesty, like congratulating us for what we accomplished and then taking it further. But I do think you're right. I think there was an under, I mean, I was upset with CDC when I left because they stopped tracking people that were infected that were previously vaccinated. So if you didn't track it, well, because then you couldn't report that there were people vaccinated that got infected. But no, why did they stop tracking it?

But I think there was a decision not to do anything that made the vaccine sound like it didn't work. Because you know I've been I've been scratching my head about this Bob you know I'm fine with people demonizing me. I mean you know you lived it the same way I lived it. Certainly I wasn't reporting anything that wasn't widely reported. Like, I don't know. I've gone back now and spent so much time that is so emotionally disruptive to looking at media accounts at the time from Fox and from Newsmax as it came into its own

and got clearances and stuff. Nobody was saying, wait a minute, this vaccine has tons of side effects. This vaccine, nobody, Rachel Maddow is now held up on a pedestal for saying, you take this vaccine, you don't get COVID. Nobody corrected her at the time though, Doc. I agree, well, and others were saying it too.

I mean, the president of the United States said it. Biden said this was a epidemic of the unvaccinated. Tony wasn't aggressive in putting this in perspective. The CDC didn't put it in perspective. The reality is this vaccine, listen, it's a short duration in which this vaccine provides some efficacy, maybe four to six months max. And they say now, Doc, the side effects, we're not impressed. And I've been doing a lot of homework on this. I mean, you know, you've been- There's very significant side effects to this.

I mean, I'd say, and I'll tell you if I can ever help you, my clinic is about 50, 60% now long COVID. But of the patients that I have long COVID, I would say probably 10% of them never had COVID, it's vaccine induced. Right. And I can prove that they never had COVID. I can do special tests in their blood

and show they never had COVID. No, no, I believe it. The research I'm seeing, I know this is gonna get me in trouble, but I'm not doing it to be controversial. I don't get, this doesn't help me in any way to have this conversation, to be honest. But I'm not saying what a lot of people on the internet are saying, which is that the vaccine is poison,

the vaccine hurts more people than it helps. Everybody knew it at the time when it got the EUA. Pfizer hid. Now, this is the one bad fact in my analysis. Pfizer wanted the data of their testing buried for over 70 years before people could see it. I don't know any good reason for that if it's in fact true, but unpack two things for me.

The idea that you knew the vaccine was poison and you gave it to people anyway, you knew it wouldn't help anybody and you gave it to them anyway, and Pfizer knew it, that's why they hid or wanted to hide the research. What do you make of those three assertions? I was on the board of Operation Workbeat. I'm very proud of what we accomplished.

So then the vaccine you don't believe is poison? I don't believe it's poison. I believe this vaccine has saved many, many people's lives. That said, the people's lives it saved were the vulnerable people, people over 60, 65, 70, 75, nursing home people. So the benefit to them, I think outweighs the risk, although they still should have the voice to say, I want the vaccine or I don't want the vaccine. The benefit to the 30 year old firefighter,

I don't see the benefit. The benefit is that you don't get the 60-year-old person sick as easily if you as the 30-year-old have been vaccinated. If the 30-year-old happens to be very obese and have huge body mass index, there may be a benefit. But in general, there was no benefit to many people. And the vaccine should have been prioritized. And mostly now, I think it have been prioritized and mostly now I

think it is being prioritized for the vulnerable. In my clinical practice I use the vaccine for you know in the United States to go back to your question about it's no big deal just a cold. In the United States right now it's the third or fourth leading cause of death. That's no cold, right? Now, who does it cause death in? Well, it causes death in people over the age of 60, 65, 70, 75. You know, COVID is not a lung disease. People misunderstand it. COVID is a blood vessel disease. It causes microcoagulation of the blood vessels, which can then lead to myocardial infarction or stroke or pulmonary emboli. I remember the president used to say to me when CDC showed a lot of the people who died of COVID,

really died of a heart attack. And he said, Bob, you should list them as a heart attack, not COVID. I said, no, Mr. President, they died of a heart attack because they had COVID, because it was causing their blood to clot. So COVID is still a significant cause of death. COVID because it was causing their blood to clot. So COVID is still a significant cause of death. We probably are still losing 150 people a day in this country. It's all preventable death. Nobody has to die of COVID. If you are vaccinated and appropriately,

which probably means every six months as a minimum, you are less likely to die. If you don't want to get vaccinated, at least get diagnosed. If you go on Paxlovid or the Merck drug within the first 48 hours, you won't die. It's very sad to me when I was the head guy for Maryland. Every morning I'd get up and see how many people died.

Some days I'd have 35, 40 people died in Maryland. I'd say, why are they dying? Aren't we diagnosing them? Aren't we getting them into treatment? So it's still a significant issue for the vulnerable. It's not a big deal for the non-vulnerable. And I think that's really important for people to grasp. I think it's an important vaccine. I mean, I've been vaccinated

eight times. My wife's been vaccinated eight times. But my grandchildren, who I all got vaccinated initially because I thought when the COVID virus came into them, since I knew you lost taste and smell, I knew that this was a virus that also got in the central nervous system. I wanted to minimize the central nervous system replication they had, so I thought it'd be better if they had some immunity. I was still hoping they'd go to the Ivy League schools, but after the recent stuff I'm not so sure. That's exactly right. Talk about a different virus. Yeah, talking to a good state school. But the point is, so I don't advocate it at all in these kids anymore.

They get re-immunized automatically by getting reinfected every year. But for the vulnerable, I still do. Now I will say this. I don't think people have been as transparent as they should, and this includes the pharmaceutical companies as well as some of the public health leaders

that have been the big cheerleaders for vaccines, is there are side effects to these vaccines. And I have some patients whose lives have really been turned upside down because of the vaccine. They've lost their ability to function, to work, et cetera. Right, but you know what the big shots tell me, Bob, is, yeah, maybe, we have a lot of databases, it's not showing up in a real way yet.

Theirs is BS. And anything that's side effects with this vaccine that we saw in the testing phase was nothing out of the ordinary. Yeah. Well, it's really important to get data the way I do is person to person, patient to patient. All right. And I've evaluated many patients. That I have no doubt, their symptoms and disease course is 100 percent related to the vaccine. Now, what is it Chris? Well, it's the spike protein is immunotoxic.

You get infected, it's immunotoxic. But when you give the vaccine, we make the spike protein. Now this is my opinion, okay? When I give you an mRNA vaccine, which I helped develop, and I've given to a lot of patients and I've taken it myself multiple times,

I don't know how much spike protein you make. Right. Because I give you mRNA and then your body goes makes it. Right. So you make a little, you may make a lot. You may make it for a week, you may make it for a month. So I've come to the point of view now as I'm seeing more and more side effects. Not to mention some of the other reports that you've seen about looking at the purity of nucleic acids in some of these vaccines. While the mRNA vaccine was critical to me as

a CDC director that was looking at a pandemic that could kill more than a million people, and I normally would have to wait one or two years for a vaccine, the mRNA technology allowed that to happen very rapidly. I think it's a great benefit. But then how to use that benefit? I'm now more of the point of view,

and I wish the country would switch more rapidly. I'm more of the point of view, and in my clinical practice, I use the protein vaccine. So I know exactly how much spike protein you get. Your body's not becoming a manufacturing plant, okay? I give you a certain amount of spike protein that your body's not becoming a manufacturing plant. Right. Okay? I give you a certain amount of spike protein that's not able to replicate, not able to reproduce itself, and I know the decay curve in the human body, and that's the vaccine

I use now. It's made by Novavax. I think it's, in my view, doesn't have all the nuances that we don't understand about those individuals that seems to get, looks like there's prolonged production or impact or negative consequence from spike protein in some people that get the mRNA vaccine. It's still rare, but it's real. If you came down and visited me and interviewed my patients, you'd interview patient after patient after patient that did not have COVID,

but are very sick, you would say very sick long COVID patients. And it's all from the vaccine. The good news is, in general, patients do get better over time. It resolves. Right. I have a couple that are out four years. I am starting to treat patients with some off-label stuff that I think is interesting in making some impact, but it's a mistake to say these vaccines are without consequences. I do think the protein vaccine should be used more. I'm disappointed that people haven't jumped more to it because I think it doesn't have some of the unknown safety

concerns that we're starting to worry about when it comes to- Well, now, nobody wants to talk about it anymore, Doc. One of the things that I was very happy that you agreed with me on early on is we need a 9-11 style commission to look at all of these decisions that were made and get a full compliment of all kinds of different theories and people who believe different things. It worked after 9-11. There was a lot of diversity of opinion

on that commission also about what happened. We didn't follow their directives very well, but I think that we need it because people wanna move on from this what happened. We didn't follow their directives very well, but I think that we need it because people want to move on from this because they only see blame and people making money from it online. I mean, we can't even get past the ivermectin thing. You know, I can't tell you how many people will say to me, um, ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, you wouldn't have needed the vaccine. If everybody had just been taking that stuff, uh, we would have been fine.

And as you know, Ivermectin is like one of the most studied things now because of all this, but even the maker of it, you saw how the press misused it too. They tried to say they're treating people with a, you know, a veterinary drug. Well, I said that, I said that because that's how it was explained to us. When people were making a run. Human product that we were prescribing to humans. 100% understood, but you'll remember at the time, there was such a rush on it as it became a fad

that they couldn't get it human grade. They had to get the veterinary grade, which comes in a paste. EDC got mad at me, but I was the director. Doesn't mean they don't get mad at me, but I was the director. When hydroxychloroquine came, I didn't know if it worked or didn't work. But I put in the MMWR, I asked the MMWR to do a report

on everything we know on hydroxychloroquine. Because I wanted doctors that chose to use it to know what we knew. I wasn't recommending it. I wasn't not recommending it. I was just saying, here's what we know about this drug. Right. Here's what we know about it, how it's used, what the side effects are. And you know, the same thing, I didn't do it for ivermectin because I think most people understood it

much better because it had been much more used. But I've always felt, and now I'm in this situation, I have lots of patients that I'm treating now with off-label therapeutic regimens, both for the microcoagulation and also for the cognitive dysfunction and different regimens, but they're all off-label. This is where it goes back to what you saw.

You really have to get the answer from the doctors that are actually doing it. Right. Not some guy that sits in an office at NIH and looks at some computer or not some statistician at Pfizer and Moderna that are looking at these case reports. You really do. I've always, people got to

criticize me when I became CDC director because they thought it was really an odd choice. I actually got some good articles saying I was a great AIDS doctor and that it would be a real loss for me to go to CDC. It made no sense. My wife said, wow, these people really like you. I said, no, these people hate me. They just want to block my nomination.

But what I tried to tell people when they attack me of not being, you know, having public health experience, I said there's two approaches to public health. One approach is to come up with a concept and treat a population and it trickles down to the community, into the family, into the individual. All right. into the individual, all right? Another approach is to take an individual, a million individuals, and trickle it up, you know, to the family, to the community.

They're both public health approaches. I did it from the point of view of a doctor, of getting it right one patient at a time, and if I did it one patient at a time right, I did it and one patient at a time right, then I affected the family, then the community, then the population. The public health guys learned more epidemiologically, they'd throw something into a population and then

hope it trickles down and protects some of the population. That's the advantage of really good clinicians. You saw doctors in California and others, they lost their license because they prescribe something. That's just not right. But what I don't understand is the politicization of it. Forget about the anecdote that when the former president Trump was sick, he said, I don't want any of the other stuff.

I want the antibodies. Give me the good stuff that works. And in talking with people that were part of the development, they were so frustrated. Merck, who made ivermectin, put out a statement saying, we are not saying that this should be used as a baseline, frontline weapon against COVID-19. What else do you need to hear? frontline, you know, weapon against COVID-19.

What else do you need to hear? You know, I'm on it right now as part of my long COVID protocol. My doctor has me on a low, what do you guys call it? A prophylactic dose. But it's one of a dozen things that I'm taking because of newer research about its use in long COVID. I didn't take it any of the times I had COVID because my doctor said to me, I just don't know that it works. It's been researched so much, the studies are all over the place. Why do you believe people

need to cling to this idea that ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine were kept from them when they were cures? You know, I don't know the answer to that, Chris. I mean, I do feel unfortunately a lot of the scientific community has sort of an arrogance that it's their way or no way, and they're the purest way. I remember many years ago in the early 90s, Congress, Sam Nunn and Warner decided to put a bill in that gave $20 million to

continue my research and developing a vaccine for therapy. I got destroyed. I got put under investigation. I got just clobbered that the academic community was so angry that I could get funded independent of NIH. They finally made up some false allegations to get me accused of scientific misconduct. I went through six months of hell only at the end to have an NIH panel, both 17 to one that my research was rock solid and should continue. And, you know, and finally getting a retraction in the Washington Post, I think on page, I think it was A26. Yeah.

After being on the front page forever. I mean, my wife wouldn't go to the swimming pool anymore. My kids were ashamed to see their father accused of all of this. And it was all a lie. It was all set up. And so what happened at the end of the day was they finally agreed I could continue my research, but my boss, who was part of this effort

to do negative things to me, they decided to put the $20 million into a panel and they distributed the money to themselves to do their own research. If you buck the establishment, it's brutal. Brutal. Yeah, believe me, I'm getting it now. I said I'm taking ivermectin

because I am taking ivermectin, but again, it's one of a dozen things. I don't think it's a magic pill. And I got all these people, well, first of all, I mean, talk about, you know, something being of no benefit for you to say. I have the anti-vaxxers saying, fuck you, you should have said take ivermectin from the beginning.

The makers of ivermectin didn't tell you to take it in the beginning. And then the other side says what are you taking ivermectin for? It's an anti-parasitic. It has nothing to do with what you're dealing with. And it's like, you know, nobody wants to have a conversation. They just want to like kind of take scalps. The right position for us to hold on to is to have all the information out there and support the ability of the doctor and the patient to make their own decision. Right? Make their own decision. I will tell you, I had a woman who was the sickest patient I've ever seen since I came back.

When I came back to practice after I left CDC, I did outpatient infectious disease, and I thought I'd do HIV and hepatitis and complicated ID. I walked into this internal medicine clinic where they took care of about 100,000 lives within the whole system. And I saw all these people that nobody was taking care of that had long COVID. Yeah. So I said, okay, it reminded me of the early AIDS days when I was at Walter Reed in 1981,

82, 83, nobody wants to take care of the AIDS patients. And I just raised my hand and said, sure, I'll do it. I'll do it. I made my career around that decision. And so I said, I'd take care of the long COVID and I started seeing them and then word got out that I was seeing long COVID and people started coming in from different States and I got a pretty full clinic now of long COVID. So this woman is in my clinic now. So you believe in long COVID by the way?

Pardon me? You believe in long COVID? No, I think I have lots of patients with it. Because you know, the government doesn't talk about long COVID very much. And I get people tell me, you know, Chris, I totally get that you don't feel right. But you know, this long COVID thing, it's, you know, it's not a thing exactly. Like we think it's a thing, but we don't know. And so go slow on it.

So I just, you know. It's a big thing and it's real and it's really impacted lives. So as I tell this story, and maybe someday you and I will do more on it because I think it's really important. So this young woman comes in, young, she's 56 years old.

She comes to see me. I've been doing this now for three and a half years. And when she talked, be tough, it was you, when she talked, she could speak in maybe three to five words and then she couldn't remember what the next three to five words were. Wow. You couldn't find them.

And then she'd have to pause and then she'd take a minute, she'd remember them and then she'd have to pause and then she'd take a minute she'd remember them and then do that and then so she talked in like five word blocks and then pause for you know 30 seconds or a minute or three minutes. Wow. So she really couldn't communicate and I said you, it's my wife's name also, I said Joy, you know you're the sickest person that I've ever seen from cognitive dysfunction in my three and a half four years doing this. She immediately burst out in tears. Yeah. Waterfalls. And awkward moment, left with her friend,

went home and told my wife the story. My wife said, you know, Bob, come on, I thought you were better, you know, better bedside manner, you know, you brought this lady to tears, what's wrong with you? And I said, you know, I feel real bad about it,

but I just had to tell the truth. And so the next week she came in to see me and she was still obviously really debilitated. And in her own way, she said, I said, I wanna, you know, first I wanna apologize for last week when I told you the truth, but I might have not done it in the most kindest way, I guess, by telling you the sickest person I've ever seen.

She stopped me. She said, Dr. Redfield, pause, I did not cry, pause, pause, because you told me I was the sickest person you'd ever seen. What? I cried because you're the first doctor that acknowledged I was sick. Yeah, I believe it, Bob, and not just because I believe you.

Every single one of my patients, Chris. Yeah, people tell you you don't have that. I have one guy has seen like $35. Yeah, I believe it. It was my experience as well. And they all tell him he needs a psychiatrist. Yes. Or that he's trying to get off work.

Yes. Or he's trying to get the disability. And these people have long COVID. I have a guy, very prominent guy, MD Anderson physician, came to see me and he had decided he was going to retire as a professor and leave medicine because he could no longer function. He couldn't remember stuff. I showed him how I use my phone and I have all my textbooks on the phone and I

just look everything up even in front of the patient. I said, well, let me look that up, okay? You know, because I don't want to give him, well, let me look that up. You know, I don't remember. Let me look that up. And I said, you can do that. You can put your books. I showed her how you put all your books on the phone. You don't have to worry about it. No, I got, I got, I got to retire. I can't do it. I said, I don't want you to do that because you're going to get better. But we have to change the culture and we need the Redfields and all the big brains to be

part of talking about the end of the story. He left me and he came back eight weeks later. And he said, first thing, Dr. Redfield, I want to thank you. I said, Dr. So-and-so, what are you thanking me for? I didn't do anything for you. And he said, yes, you did. You told me that I was going to get better. And I told him how to keep the journal and what his issues were.

He said, while I'm not normal, over the last two months, I can see I'm getting a little better. Right. I've seen him since then and now I'm treating him with a special treatment that I use for cognitive dysfunction and he never stopped practicing medicine. He just paused.

Right. As you can use this as time to read up and do some stuff. So he's back in practice, he's doing well. So it is really sad. To me, the saddest thing is these patients are, people don't take time to listen to them. Right. I did for a while, for the first year and a half

to two years, I felt like I was a psychiatrist. Because they'd come in, I didn't have to examine them, I really just would sit and listen to their stories. And then at the end of it, I'd say, well, you have long COVID. They'd say, what? I said, well, you have long COVID. You mean, I don't need a psychiatrist? I said, no, you have long COVID. You may be depressed. We can talk about that. You do have long COVID. And the problem with long COVID, it has so many different ways it can affect the body. Yes. The microcoagulation. Who would have known Chris, I have a one lady that I dearly love, who came to me because she's her her mid-50s because she felt like she was suffocating.

Yes, I've heard this. Suffocating, suffocating, suffocating. So, you know, we work up her heart, her heart is normal. We work up her lungs, totally normal, all right? Great lungs, great heart. Why is she suffocating? So I put my hand and I met another great doctor for long COVID. If you're ever looking for one of the best, his name's Dr. Jordan Vaughn. He's

in Birmingham, Alabama. He's one of the best. He's taught me a lot. I've taught him a little. He taught me a lot. Okay. He's seen over, you know, 1500, 2000 patients now with long COVID. He's seen over 1,500, 2,000 patients now with long COVID. And he's the one who developed a lot of the treatment with microcoagulations with three anticoagulants and stuff like that. So anyhow, we checked her out and she did have a lot of micro-fibro-clotting. But that still didn't explain her just inability to feel like she could breathe. And what he taught me was had I evaluated her pelvic veins, I said, what do you mean

her pelvic veins? I'm an infectious disease doctor taking her COVID. What are you talking about pelvic veins? He said, mom, these patients' veins lose their tonality so they kind of get like an overblown balloon. And you may know this, you may not know this, but 70% of our blood supply is in our veins, not in our arteries.

And if our veins become like balloons, it could be 85% of our blood supply. And if it's 85% of our blood supply, there's less blood going in our arteries back to our right heart. If there's less blood going to our right heart, we're going to feel short of breath. Right. Because we're not getting enough blood.

So anyhow, I study her veins, her pelvic veins. I could show you pictures of them. Unbelievable. What happens is the vein loses its tone. So when the iliac artery goes over the pelvic vein, it blocks it. So now the pelvic vein, iliac vein's not getting the blood back into the vena cava. It's staying in the pelvis. So what does the body do?

It starts making collateral veins. If I showed you a picture of her venogram, she's got like 30 or 40 veins in her pelvis that have nothing to do with getting blood back to her right heart. Figure that all out. I send her to an interventional radiologist who puts a stent in her iliac vein and it's all corrected. Who would have ever thought of that long COVID? Never, but you know what? This will happen more and more the more we discuss that COVID's a thing,

a long COVID is a thing, and we need to, because as you know, the virus is a phage. And I'm gonna explain that to the audience, P-H-A-G-E. It's not going anywhere. It's gonna keep infecting us and infecting us in different ways. And we won't even talk about it because it's become a political football. Bob, let me let you go.

I appreciate you spending all this time with me, Dr. Redfield. I really see you not just as somebody who's so important in the past and dealing with what was the largest public emergency in my lifetime, but what we're gonna learn in the future, because COVID's not over. It's not going away. People are still sick. People like me, I'm just one of the luckier ones. So thank you very much for joining me.

You do me a favor, Chris. Yes, sir. At some time when you're open to it, tell me a little bit more about your journey so I can learn from you. I learn from patients, you know, I'm not critical of the multiple drugs and treatments you're on. We have a number of doctors that are in the trenches that are just trying different things.

And we learn what works with one patient, sometimes doctors will try it for another patient. I'll take you all through it. If you want to cheat, I'll send you a link to my sub stack. My doctor, I'm actually doing a couple with her this afternoon, she is, I've given her permission to take people through what she saw in my blood with all the micro clotting and the spike protein and all that, and what she's gonna do about it

and why we're doing these things and why I'm taking all these things and the different phases and all that, and what she's gonna do about it, and why we're doing these things, and why I'm taking all these things, and the different phases, and all this other stuff. So it's all there on the sub stack, but I'll call you and we'll talk about it, and I look forward to continuing our conversation to help as many as we can with this. Thank you, Doctor.

Thanks, Chris. God bless. There's a lot there. You'll probably have to listen to it twice. I know I will, and I keep having these conversations. We are going in the wrong direction with everything that matters, because all we've done is use it as a point of division. You're bad.

This is bad. This was wrong. This is a lie. This is that. That congressional committee, I'm sure some of the people on it are well intentioned, but they're not going to really get to the origin of COVID because China is going to go tell them to fuck off. And we don't have any leverage with them. And they're not dealing with any of these other questions because it's just about politics of advantage. That's why they're

making Fauci a boogeyman in my opinion, because it's a way to blame the Biden administration, I guess, even though Trump was working with Fauci also. We need to do better. We need a commission and we need to have honest conversations. You know, there's a reason that Redfield was willing to come on a podcast. He's a busy guy with a big pedigree. People aren't asking him about this stuff and he wants to talk about it. We all should. Thank you for subscribing. Thank you for following. Thank you for being an independent, being a critical thinker, being a free agent, wearing your independence. And I'm going to be talking about this on NewsNation more than anybody else's, not just because I have long COVID, but because long COVID is a thing.

And there are a lot of questions that need to be answered about what was right and what was wrong, because we're not done learning the lessons. We've got to learn the lessons of the past because we're dealing with new problems. Because of COVID, it is real and it's not going away. So let's get after it.