The Daily Signal - ‘It’s Going to Be Catastrophic’: Why the Next Pandemic Will Be Worse Than COVID

Episode Date: July 9, 2024

The former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is warning Americans to prepare for the next pandemic, which he fears will be more catastrophic than COVID-19. Dr. Robert Redfield, a virologist who continues to treat patients suffering from COVID, oversaw the CDC’s initial response to the pandemic and served as a member of the White House’s Coronavirus Task Force under former President Donald Trump. "We are going to have another pandemic," Redfield told The Daily Signal. "I do believe it's going to be much more catastrophic than the COVID pandemic." Redfield predicted the next pandemic would be the bird flu, also known as H5N1. Its mortality rate is significantly higher than COVID: 52% of the 888 infected patients with H5N1 have died since 2003. "COVID's mortality was about 0.6%," Redfield said. "Bird flu's mortality is going to be north of 5%, 10%, 15%, 20%. It's going to be catastrophic." With more than 100 million chickens and turkeys already infected in the United States, Redfield said bird flu has also been found in 27 different mammals. And while there remains a low risk of infecting humans right now, another mishap like the COVID lab leak could quickly expedite bird flu's transmission. "This is why I've called for a moratorium on gain-of-function research until we can have a broader public debate about it," he said. "I'm not convinced it needs to be done. I don't think there's really any benefit from it. Some of my colleagues disagree with me, but I think we shouldn't do it until we know how we do it in a safe, responsible, and effective way and we clearly can't do that at the present time." Redfield served on a nonpartisan commission convened by The Heritage Foundation, which issued a blistering critique of China’s COVID-19 cover-up. The commission, which released its report Monday, blamed the communist government in Beijing for obfuscating the truth about the pandemic's origin and causing widespread damage and death as a result. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The public health institutions of our nation have lost trust. It takes decades to build trust. It takes hours to lose it. The public health community at large has lost a lot of trust. This is the Daily Signal podcast for Tuesday, July 9th. I'm your host, Rob Luey, and that was the voice of Dr. Robert Redfield, former director of the Centers for Disease, Control, and Prevention. Dr. Redfield served as a member.

of a nonpartisan commission studying COVID and China. The Heritage Foundation's commission was formed with the purpose of reviewing the facts and circumstances related to one of the most devastating pandemics the world has ever seen. And it assessed and calculated the human toll and economic damage caused by the Chinese government. Dr. Redfield joins us on the Daily Signal podcast today

to talk about the report's findings and some recommendations that he and the, other commissioners are putting forward for Congress and the American people to consider. He also shares with us some of the threats that we face in the future. Be sure to listen to our interview right after this. So what is going on with Ukraine? What is this deal with the border? How do you feel about school choice?

These are the questions that come up to conservatives sitting at parties, at dinner, at family reunions. What do you say when the... these questions come up. I'm Mark Geinney, the host of the podcast for you. Heritage Explains brought to you by all of your friends here at the Heritage Foundation. Through the creative use of stories, the knowledge of our super passionate experts, we bring you the most important policy issues of the day and break them down in a way that is understandable. So check out Heritage Explains wherever you get your podcasts. Dr. Robert Redfield is joining the Daily Signal today.

to discuss a groundbreaking report on China and COVID-19. Dr. Redfield is best known as director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention during the Trump administration, where he oversaw the agency's response to the COVID-19 pandemic and served as a member of the White House's coronavirus task force. Dr. Redfield, thanks for being with us today. Thanks for having me. You served with a distinguished group of individuals on a Heritage Foundation Commission, which investigated the impact of COVID-19, specifically as it related to China's role. I'd like you to share as you're as a member of the commission, this nonpartisan commission,

and also a medical expert, what the commission's direction was, why you decided to set out and look at this more closely, and what did you find? Well, I think the most important issue that the commission was trying to address, hence the title of the report, was holding China accountable for its role. in what is the most catastrophic pandemic we've had at our time, the COVID-19. And while the commission came to the unanimous conclusion that the most likely source of COVID-19 was a accidental laboratory leak from the Wuhan lab. That really wasn't the essential goal of the report.

The essential goal of the report really was how to hold China accountable for the actions that they took independent of the origin of the virus, which obviously not only China was involved in, but so was the U.S. government and other governments that were involved in that research. And so that really was the issue, was to try to get some understanding first what was the extent of the cost. And we do know that it was over 1.1 million Americans lost their lives. If you look at it globally, over 28 million people lost their lives.

And then, of course, trillions and trillions of dollars, which the Heritage Group, who looked at this economically, came to the conclusion that, at least for the United States, it was about an $18 trillion cost. And then the question is, well, how do you hold China accountable for that? One of the problems with the current international health regulations that WHA has, there's no teeth. There's nothing to enforce them. WHO asked based on the international health regulations, which China has signed,

they're supposed to allow people like myself, CDC, to come in and work within 48 hours to help understand the cause of the epidemic. My attempts to get CDC into China were denied, even to the extent of myself asking President Trump to call President Zee and allow my team to go in in the first week of China, and that request was never responded to. It's not like it was denied. I was in the room when the president requested it, and the president of China sort of said to get back to us, but nobody ever got back to us, and we never were able to go in. So there was a clear violation of the international health regulation, and how do you hold countries accountable to that?

Well, it certainly would take an administration that is willing to go to bat for people like yourself and hold China accountable. I don't necessarily know that the Biden administration is willing to do that based on its actions. So what does it mean? Do we need a change in leadership in Washington to finally hold China accountable for what happened? Well, I think part of it is heightening the fact of what this commission report tried to do. And it really, I think, important nonpartisan way is just to really put it out there that there needs to be some accountability to China's actions of how they responded to the pandemic. We now know that the initial transmission of the virus that we know is COVID-19 probably began in August, September of 2019. The Chinese government really didn't acknowledge it

until December, January 2020. So they clearly knew there was a new pandemic going on months before they gave sort of the world an awareness of it, which is unfortunately. because I think the world could have benefited from having that three months head start. And again, there was an open transparency for WHO or CDC or others to go in and help understand some of the key issues because China originally denied that and even the head of CDC in China, who I talked to George Gao, told me that there was no evidence of human-to-human transmission. Clearly they had strong evidence of human-to-human transmission long before that, okay? there was no evidence of asymptomatic infection. Clearly they had evidence of asymptomatic infection long

before that. So those were two critical issues because our whole public health response was driven by the fact that this was likely not very human-to-human transmissible and that the key to diagnosis was symptomatic illness. I know when I diagnosed the first 14 cases of COVID in the United States in January, early February, of 2020, we evaluated almost 800 contacts of those cases. And of those 800 contacts, only two of them were shown to be infected with COVID. But you have to understand how we evaluated them. We evaluated them based on the understanding from our Chinese colleagues that there was no asymptomatic infection. So we evaluated everybody first for symptoms. If you didn't have symptoms, that was it. all right the people who had symptoms then we evaluated by doing a test to see if they were infected with

COVID so two of the 800 people were confirmed to have COVID both were spouses of people with cases both who were symptomatic had I had CDC test everybody rather than just look for symptoms I suspect we would have found a much greater number of people infected so we were also led to believe early on from our own data because of the bias and how we did it that this was not a highly infectious virus. Turns out the Diamond Princess happened. A Japanese cruise ship happened, and CDC was invited to help Japan evaluate that in February of 2020. And we found about half of the people on the ship were infected.

Most of them didn't have symptoms. And that's when we finally figured out asymptomatic transmission was a big problem. And this was a highly infectious virus, human to human. So what you're saying is if you had known, if you had that three-month head start, if China had alerted you and others across the globe, as somebody who's a virologist and a medical expert yourself, you would have been able to take steps and precautions to prepare and prevent a lot of this suffering. Our approach from a public health point of view would have been the idea of expanding diagnosis with testing to identify the silent epidemic because it was the asymptomatic individuals that were spreading the pandemic.

It wasn't a sick individual that everyone kind of stayed away from and put their mask on. And so by not having that understanding, we lost, if you will, the public health jump. We would have probably never been able to contain it, but we would have changed the kinetics of its spread. And, you know, that time that we modified it was very usefully spent in developing countermeasures, vaccines and antiviral drugs, etc. So I think it could have had a significant impact on the kinetics of the pandemic. Why did China hide it? Well, I don't think it's unusual for countries to not put on the front page when they have an epidemic or pandemic that might influence the economics of their country.

China was not forthcoming when they had SARS in 2003. It took them a long time to finally acknowledge it. Luckily for the world, SARS, which is another corrupt. coronavirus, and it's important when it went from a bat to a civet cat to humans, it never really learned how to go efficiently human to human. This is why we should have never called COVID-Sars-like, because it was not SARS-like at all, okay? But they were very slow in acknowledging the SARS epidemic, but luckily for the world, SARS didn't really know how to go human to human in that we had less than 10,000 cases in the world. Unfortunately, for us, COVID-19 was probably

in my view as a virologist, it's probably the second most infectious virus that I know of. And this is why I fairly early on concluded that I did not believe this virus was a consequence of natural spillover, which takes a long time of trial and error, trial and error, trial and error for a new pathogen to go from an animal into humans. I thought it was much more likely that this virus was educated in the laboratory, how to infect humans. And to reaffirm my hypothesis in 2014, 2014, 2015, this laboratory actually published a paper where they showed that they had successfully taught coronavirus to infect human tissue. Interesting.

Okay. Thank you for sharing that with us. Now, we've talked a lot about how this came about. You also made a point at the beginning that it's not just to look back, but to look forward. And so you've proposed some solutions, including one where you're recommending that Congress pass an amendment to the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act. Could you share with us about some of the steps that you think policymakers in Washington should take now that they've had the benefit of seeing your report and some of the findings? Well, I think some of the areas that are really important is, and I do agree with our first recommendation, was we need a 9-11 type commission to go through and really take this apart, nonpartisan commission to really see what happened here.

What went right, what went wrong. because I'm of the view, and some people may disagree with me, but I'm of the view that the most important national security threat that our nation has right now is biosecurity. I think it's a time for our nation to step back and realize that the plane field has changed, similar to what happened when, say, atomic bomb came into the theater, and we've really realized that nuclear and atomic issues had a sense, piece in our national security posture. Well, I'll argue biosecurity needs to have that central

piece. So part of it is to go through, do a 9-11, take a good look at it, and, you know, and really start to look at what is it that we need to do to be better prepared. Because I'm also at the point of view that we are going to have another pandemic. I do believe it's going to be much more catastrophic than the COVID pandemic. I refer the COVID pandemic as the lesser pandemic. The great pandemic is coming. I think it's going to be a bird flu pandemic. You hear a lot about it. We have over 100 million chickens and turkeys infected in the United States already, but that virus likes to go in chickens and turkeys and ducks. It doesn't really know how to go in humans yet, but it has moved into 27 different mammals in the United States, including in dolphins and seals and polar bears and

and brown bears and black bears and skunks and mice. So it's in a lot of species. And it gets into those species. It's trying to learn how to, okay, how can I get in the species? Okay, the next thing, how can I get that species now to transmit to itself? All right. And eventually there'll be changes. We know that it only needs four amino acid changes.

Four amino acids is all needed to take COVID bird flu that can't infect humans to make it a bird flu that's highly infectious for humans. Now, in biological terms, it may sign four is not very many, but in biological, and that's a huge species barrier for it to overcome. So that could take 10 years, 100 years, 500 years, who knows, okay? But if one does purposeful gain of function research where I in the laboratory make those four amino acid changes, I can make this virus in months.

All right, and this is why I've called for a moratorium on gain of function research until we can have a broader public debate about it and how we can have it really much more regulated if the society decides it needs to be done. I'm not convinced it needs to be done. I don't think there's really any benefit from it. Some of my colleagues disagree with me, but I think we shouldn't do it until we know how we do it in a safe, responsible, and effective way. And we clearly can't do that at the present time. Those who are still advocating for gain of function research, what is their justification or argument? Their argument is that it gives them a jump start and how to develop countermeasures to the pathogen when it occurs. The problem with the argument is twofold. You know, 25 years ago, I would have probably agreed with that because we didn't have the scientific power to develop countermeasures as quickly as we do now. But now with the technologies that we have, we can develop countermeasures in weeks. you know, whether it's vaccines or antivirals in weeks. And I think all we do by the gain of function is we actually can create some of these pathogens that then go on to cause us trouble.

And I think COVID is a test case for why we don't want to do gain of function research. The people that are advocates for it think it gets a head start. They've actually even been quoted in the Washington Post about 12 years ago as saying that if the price of doing gain of function research is that we have a pandemic, then it's worth the price. Well, I don't agree with them. I don't think it was worth $28 million lives. I don't think it was worth the trillion dollars of cost and this disruption that we had.

And I think, I've said this before to my scientific colleagues and I'm not popular with them when I say it, I think, you know, really the COVID pandemic was a direct consequence of science and the arrogance of arrogance that science had that nothing could go wrong. And in fact, something went terribly wrong. It seems that many Americans just want to move on from COVID.

obviously a difficult period for our country and for them in their personal lives. Do you think it's possible to have a 9-11 style commission that, and what would it take? Would it take a president to endorse that type of an idea? Well, you need a president to want to provide the leadership for it for it, for sure, and you need Congress to really want to get behind it and that people see. I think it is a really important first step to, and we have now journalists on both sides of the spectrum, calling for it. I know Chris Como, who's fairly liberal, is a very aggressive advocate now to get a 9-11 commission. And I think many of us, like myself and others, now the commission

report, believe it's our first recommendation. So I think it's going to be really important. I think people don't realize COVID is here to stay. COVID is now the third or fourth leading cause of death in America. So it's not like gone away. I'm still practicing medicine one and a half days a week. 75% of my practice now is long COVID, which is probably about anywhere from 5 to 20%. We probably have about 15 million Americans right now who are significantly debilitated from long COVID. Good news, it's likely going to get better over time with them. But the bad news, it's quite debilitating illness.

And so even though they may be frustrated with long COVID and the policies that went, I mean COVID, and the policies that went with it, I think we need to really get aggressive in recognizing when I started saying that the national security implications of biosecurity are substantial. And that when, and I don't think it's if, I think when bird flu learns how to go human to human, our nation and the world will go through really a catastrophic period of time that will make the COVID pandemic look like sort of grade school. So far we've had 88 individuals in the world since 2003, infected with what we call H5N1,

which is the dominant bird flu that's going around now. There's some other viruses also. Of those 888 individuals, 52% of them died. So it's mortality, you know, whereas COVID's mortality was about 0.6%. Bird flu's mortality is going to be north. of, you know, five, 10, 15, 20 percent. It's going to be catastrophic. And, you know, we can prepare by, and I've argued this, and I will continue to argue it, I think that since this is such a national security threat, we should have a response proportional to the threat. We have

a defense department, which I spent 23 years in, that has a $900 billion a year defense group of which most of those resources are really to the private sector, to defense contractors, to make sure that we have the defense capacity we need with planes and missiles and bullets and drones, etc. I will argue we need to build the same capacity, maybe not $900 billion worth, but we need to have a proportional to the threat response grounded in government. I would propose the Department of Energy. and then most of it is a private sector contractors that have antivial drug development, that have vaccine development, that have diagnostics,

that have preventive material that we can use to protect ourselves, and it also can predict what kind of medical devices that we would need for a respiratory. Many people don't know when COVID happened, and originally were causing a lot of respiratory deaths, because that original virus, like the replicate in the lower lung, the current Omicron and Beyond goes upper airway throat so we don't see the same degree of respiratory disease. But in early COVID, we had a lot of respiratory disease.

And the one thing we found out right away, as in Italy, we didn't have enough ventilators. And so Vice President Pence very rapidly went up to Ford up in Michigan and asked the Ford company if they would shut down one of their car lines and turn it over to make ventilators so we'd have ventilators. We ought to do that prospectively. We shouldn't be just sitting here saying. oh, this will never happen. It is going to happen. And we should be as prepared as possible to minimize the impact. And I will argue the number one thing that we need to do is have a huge

push on developing antiviral agents so that we have not just two that we have right now for COVID, but that we have multiple antiviral agents that could be used that would be effective to minimize the impact that this virus has. Antiviral agents do two things. You can keep you a lot. which is good thing. But antiviral agents can also change the infectivity of the individuals, so they infect less people. And antiviral act can also be used prophylactically so that if I take it, I'm less likely to have the virus actually successfully infect me. So we ought to be aggressive there. That's our best offense. Vaccines are important, but as we know from COVID, they didn't stop 1.1 million Americans from dying, all right? They did keep certain people alive. And

We've saved a lot of lives, particularly the vulnerable. I've always been an advocate of vaccines for the vulnerable. I've never been an advocate for mandating vaccines. I think it was a big public health mistake. And I don't think we should advocate vaccines for people that don't have a risk for bad outcome, which is most of us under the age of 50. But if you're old like me, 73 years old tomorrow or the next day, then my life can be saved by the vaccine.

Let me ask you this. First of all, thank you for what you've just outlined. both the threat and some of the solutions that we should be steps we should be taking now. But as somebody who served as director of the CDC, what are some of the things you mentioned the public health organizations that you think we can do to restore some of the trust and confidence that Americans may have lost during that COVID period? Yeah, I think that's a critical, critical issue. There's no doubt. And it gives me a great deal of sadness that the public health institutions over our nation have lost. lost trust. It takes decades to build trust. It takes hours to lose it. And CDC has lost a lot of

trust. NIH has lost a lot of trust. FDA has lost a lot of trust. The public health community at large has lost a lot of trust. And it is going to take a lot to rebuild that trust. my own view sadly is that will be accelerated when we're in the midst of another catastrophic pandemic because if people get to that point they're going to say well i got to trust somebody here okay but hopefully we can begin to rebuild it i think the whole decision that certain groups made current in the Biden administration the u.s. military to mandate the COVID vaccine was a bad idea I think I always am disappointed about vaccine hesitancy, but I always argued the best way to reinforce vaccine hesitancy is to tell somebody they have to take a vaccine that they don't want to take. That was a bad mistake. It was bad public policy, and it was unfortunate.

I also think there was a group of public health leaders. I don't believe I was one of them, a group of public health leaders who felt that they were smarter than the public. so they had to tell the public how they should think even if the public didn't want to think that way. I mean, things like hurt immunity, you know, that was not a well-thought-out strategy. Telling people they have to take a vaccine that they don't want to take, that was not a well-thought-out strategy. So I've always said you have to respect the individual to make their own decisions for themselves, and I need to try to explain to you why I think, you know, going in this direction is better for you than going in this direction. but it's your decision. And I think so that did a lot to lose public trust.

And I think it doesn't take a long time to rebuild it, you know. And I am, I'm sad to say that I think it will probably take another pandemic before people will probably decide to give their public health trust back to the public health agencies that they should give it to. Dr. Robert Redfield, we're grateful for your public service. We also thank you for your role on this nonpartisan commission. Again, the report is titled, Holding China Accountable for its role in the most catastrophic pandemic of our time, COVID-19. We'll be sure to leave a link to that on DailySignal.com and in the show notes. Dr. Redfield, thanks again for joining us. Thanks for having me. Pleasure.

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