Del Bigtree interviews Robert Redfield

Published on 5 March 2025

Note: the transcript is AI generated and is not 100% accurate

---

[Robert Redfield]

Introduction and Career Overview

I spent 50 years of my life becoming a major player in a disease system. We had 1.2 million Americans die of COVID. How can that be when we had the most sophisticated medical response? Our current health system is designed to react to disease. I'm controversial on this. People in the industry don't like me for what I'm about to say. Being vaccinated doesn't stop you from Okay, so let's go right there.

[Del Bigtree]

COVID Vaccine Development and Efficacy

You were right there in developing the COVID vaccine. At what point did you recognize this vaccine doesn't stop transmission? All vaccines are going to have side effects. This is given to day one Albanians and I just want you to read out loud. This is the FDA's website. Did they establish safety? What would you do?

[Robert Redfield]

Censorship and Threats

I was censored. I have death threats. I could show you some of the letters from very prominent scientists. They may not want to see the answer out there. So how does this virus that somehow came from bats lose its ability to even infect bats?

[00:01:04]

Tony wanted to preserve being a functional search at all costs. I mean, that's not what science is about. How powerful is Fauci? Is he working for someone else?

Bioweapon/Biodefense Discussion

Disturbing. So he's run our entire bioweapon biodefense group. I do think the intelligence agencies were involved and I think it was all a plan to turn the attention away from the lab. Big money, big scientific fame. They don't want the government regulating what they do.

Biosecurity as the Greatest Threat

The greatest threat to our national security in 2025 is biosecurity. The agency needs a total overhaul.

[Del Bigtree]

I do think it was a dark day for science going through COVID. You did get yourself in some trouble speaking for the best of everybody and I hope you'll continue to speak the truth when you join us.

[00:02:04]

Maha Podcast Introduction of Dr. Redfield

Dr. Robert Redfield, first of all, I want to thank you for joining me on the Maha podcast. I know you're a busy man, so we're in your home. Thank you for allowing us in.

[Robert Redfield]

Thanks for having me.

[Del Bigtree]

Yeah. To start out with, you know, first of all, your background. I mean, most of us know you as, I think, you know, director of the CDC during Trump's original tenure as president. He's coming back around. You also have a military background, though, in medicine. So just tell me a little bit about yourself, just sort of what was, you've sort of always been in public health on some level.

[Robert Redfield]

Medical School and Military Service

So I went to medical school here in Washington, Georgetown, and when I graduated from medical school, I did my internship residency and fellowship at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. The Army had put me through medical school and I had an obligation to do service. And then I was assigned to Walter Reed after my fellowship in 1982.

[00:03:06]

And I then spent the next 20 some odd years at Walter Reed as an infectious disease physician, whose main assignment was to be focused on viruses that may cause problems for men and women that were in the armed forces. And I did that as a clinician and a clinical researcher. But in that nature, Del, I had a pretty big responsibility for looking at opportunities to impact the public health of the U.S. military and did a number of things that I think had a positive influence on their health.

[Del Bigtree]

Focus on Viruses and Vaccine Development

Was a lot of that focused on viruses and things that would have been abroad while they're traveling or, you know? It was focused on viruses around the world.

[Robert Redfield]

Okay. There were threats, what we call geographic health care threats. It was also focuses on viruses that exploited blood as a mechanism of transmission, since blood products were very important for the military in times of combat.

[00:04:05]

And so those were really the two main. And the third was obviously a focus on respiratory viruses, because a lot of times in the training of the military, we'd put, you know, many, many people together in barracks and infectious disease viruses could transmit very rapidly. And when you get, you know, 20 or 30 percent of a unit sick at the same time, that has an impact on force readiness.

[Del Bigtree]

Vaccine Development for Military

How much of the work that you did focuses on vaccines? Were you developing vaccines for military?

[Robert Redfield]

Yeah. So I did a lot of work on vaccines, particularly the hepatitis A vaccine. The hepatitis B vaccine. Those were probably the dominant vaccines that I worked on. Very rapidly though, when I started, after I finished my fellowship, I started to see patients at Walter Reed that were very sick.

[00:05:01]

I didn't quite know why. And they were very young. And they all had what we originally called AIDS related complex. And very rapidly, I became very interested in this new disease AIDS and developed the military's program initially and offered to take care of the men and women that had AIDS. So they were sent to Walter Reed and I became their physician. At that time, there was not a lot of physicians stepping forward to saying, hey, I want to, I want to take care of these patients with AIDS. And so from 1982, really on, I became sort of the Army's and in a broader sense, the Defense Department's main physician for looking at HIV and became very clear. I did the early work that showed that HIV was in fact what it was, which was a sexually transmitted disease. It wasn't just a homosexual disease.

[00:06:00]

It was a sexually transmitted disease. It turned out that in my original patients that I diagnosed in 82, 83, 84, about 30% of my patients were women. 50% of my patients were married. And so that gave me a chance to evaluate spouses. And I showed fairly clearly that the husbands and wives were infecting each other. And so came out with some early papers in JAMA, which showed the bi-directional sexual transmission of HIV, and then began a campaign to convince the military that this was a significant threat. It turns out in Korea, when you look at the military, we had about 300 cases per thousand soldiers of gonorrhea. So we knew sexual transmitted diseases were a problem for the military. And so now I had a fatal sexually transmitted disease. And we helped develop in 1983, 84, one of the enormous response for the Defense Department to develop a diagnostic program to understand the extent of HIV in the military.

[00:07:07]

We developed a very extensive clinical program to take care of the men and women that were HIV infected. And then we developed a research program that had several objectives. One of the major objectives was to try to develop an HIV vaccine, which obviously we weren't successful. Although my predecessors, or the people that came after me, did do probably the only successful HIV vaccine study that was done in Thailand. It showed short-term protection about 60%. But if you looked at long-term a year or more, it was about 27, 28%. So it really wasn't enough to get over the goal line.

[Del Bigtree]

Vaccine Success Criteria

But what is the goal line when you're developing a vaccine? I mean, 27, 28% a year down the road isn't successful. What makes it successful?

[Robert Redfield]

I think most people want to see at least 50% protection. 50? At least 50% protection. I would say we can come back to talking when you look at the influenza vaccine program.

[00:08:04]

And we might want to come back to that because I'm very concerned about bird flu. When you look at the influenza vaccine programs, which some people may define as successful, on the best of years, the influenza vaccine protects 50% of people. And frequently, it only protects 25% of people. So as low as 10, I mean, I remember reporting some pretty low numbers. Different strains. I know when I was CDC director my first year, it was 25%. And so that also sets a tone for this society to think maybe vaccines don't work that well. Because really the flu vaccine really hasn't been solved scientifically. We should really have greater work looking at what is a protective immune response. Because currently the flu vaccines at best are 50 percenters. And probably, you know, unusual, 25 to 50%. And that's why you can see why I don't think the answer for the bird flu problem that we're starting to recognize now, where the Biden administration's put this big push on making a vaccine aggressively and go back through the same path we did for COVID for accelerated approval, the vaccine's not the answer.

[00:09:12]

When we looked at COVID, we had one of the most successful vaccine programs we had. All right? And yet 1.2 million people died. So it tells you that the vaccines aren't the answer to ultimately controlling these respiratory pathogens. You need to complement that with, in my view, highly effective antivirals. And that's where we've made a mistake. We haven't invested enough in the private sector to develop antivirals.

[Del Bigtree]

Robert Kennedy Jr. and Vaccine Safety

You've set us up very nicely for a lot of topics I want to get into. But while we're on the topic of vaccines, probably the biggest conversation right now as we sit here is Robert Kennedy Jr., who I have worked with Robert Kennedy through his campaign. But I want to put all that aside. I'm really curious about your perspective, because you are one of the few that I would say has a vast knowledge of the vaccine program.

[00:10:05]

You've been deeply involved in it for your entire career. Yet you've said publicly, I've seen you in several interviews, that you think that, you know, Robert Kennedy Jr. might make a good HHS secretary. You've sort of been in support of him. And you don't seem to be too alarmed by his vaccine position. So I want to, you know, get into it a little bit. How were you first introduced to Robert Kennedy Jr.? When did you first hear of him?

[Robert Redfield]

Well, I actually met him along with his sister when I think I was a sophomore in high school. Okay. Because I had the unique assignment to cut his grass in McLean, Virginia, at their house over on Hickory Hill. And I also shoveled out their stalls. When I got the check for my work, I remember I considered not cashing it because it was signed by Robert Kennedy.

[00:11:00]

And it was such a treat to have that assignment to cut the grass and everything. So it goes way back. And when I finished high school, I was a big advocate for Robert Kennedy when he was running for president. I remember I went up to New York to help start the campaign for very sad, of course, when he was assassinated. And even though Jimmy Carter turned out to be one of the greatest ex-presidents we ever had, and I really do say that and feel for his family. He did help me decide to look at the Republican Party. And that's when Ronald Reagan came in. I got more interested in some of the Republican Party. But that's where I first met Kennedy. But when I watched Kennedy...

[Del Bigtree]

Political Affiliation Shift

Really quickly right there, because it's a big conversation, like, as originally, I guess, a Kennedy Democrat, now you consider yourself a conservative or Republican. Do you think there's any weight to this idea that the Kennedys would have been Republicans in today's day and age, or certainly John F.

[00:12:06]

Kennedy? I mean, a lot of people make that argument that the left has gone so far left that it would have left them sort of suspended. And we're looking at the namesake of Bobby Kennedy, actually sort of moving into the Republican Party, just politically having grown up through that.

[Robert Redfield]

Yeah, no, I think it's important. I think that I respect Bobby Kennedy's answer to that. And I would think he would probably say that not necessarily became a Republican, but the Democratic Party left them.

[Del Bigtree]

Yeah.

[Robert Redfield]

And I think there's a lot of people that feel the Democratic Party left them. Now, whether they're independent, or whether they're Republican, they clearly the Democratic Party left them. And I suspect that John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy in today's environment would have been pushed to the independent, pushed to where Bobby Kennedy is today, where he's really moved from being a Democrat to an independent.

[00:13:00]

Yeah. Although I think he could even move and become a Republican depending on what the policies are. You know, it's unfortunate, because I happen to be a strong believer, our nation needs two strong parties, a very strong Democratic Party and a very strong Republican Party. That's how we make progress. My friend, Rick Warren, who's a pastor out in California, we did a meeting many years ago where we had Barack Obama there and Sam Brownback there. And he was speaking why he had both of those individuals there. And I was a speaker and a couple other people were speaker. And he said, you know, when you have a bird that only has a right wing, it goes in circles. Right? When you have a bird that only has a left wing that you go in circle, you need a strong right wing and a strong left wing if you want to figure out how to make progress and go forward. But I do think the Democratic Party has sort of left most people. And I think we saw it in the last election. I mean, I don't think people were prepared for Trump to win the popular vote. He won the popular vote. Yeah.

[Del Bigtree]

Yeah. Yeah, I agree.

[00:14:00]

I think we I mean, we went through an incredible journey with, you know, Bobby, watching him start as a Democrat, moving as an independent and then ultimately joined forces with President Trump. I was disappointed.

[Robert Redfield]

I was disappointed that the Democratic Party didn't give Robert Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy a fair shake. You know, I was surprised, actually, I thought when he put his name in to run for president, the Democratic Party was clearly going to go in and at least give him a fair evaluation, give him a shot at a primary. And you saw it from the gentleman from Minnesota. They didn't give him much of a fair shot either. It was very disappointing how this was sort of preordained, you know, that it was Biden. If it wasn't Biden, it was Harris. I think a big mistake for the Democratic Party. And I think they saw the consequences with the 2024 election.

[Del Bigtree]

Democratic Party and Kennedy

Yeah, I agree. I mean, you know, if you think about it, the Democratic Party had such a great opportunity and one of the leading environmentalists of my generation.

[00:15:02]

And then he's got the Kennedy name. You know, you certainly have to think that he would have been a front runner in that primary. They could have brought whatever the issues one of them were about to talk about, which is vaccines. I mean, it's hard to imagine that just that one issue would be a reason. I mean, let me ask you that. Do you think that's the issue why they avoided giving him the time of day? Or was it the fact that he's saying I'm going to end corruption in D.C.? Well, clearly, there were people that weren't happy about him coming in.

[Robert Redfield]

If you look at where the Democratic Party has defined themselves now, they are kind of the party of the elites and the money. And clearly, Big Ag and Big Pharma has a lot of money at stake here. And I do think neither of them are overly excited about the prospect of Kennedy being secretary of health. They should be because he's promoting something that is nonpartisan that all Americans can get behind.

[00:16:02]

And I personally believe had a lot to do with Trump winning the popular vote, where he's got he got into the suburban housewives and the mothers to realize what do you mean we're not a healthy nation? Yeah. What do you mean we have obesity rates over 50 percent? What do you mean 40 to 50 to 60 percent of the American public have chronic disease? How did we go from a healthy nation when his uncle was president and less than 3 percent of people were obese? And fast forward, and now we're probably one of the most unhealthy countries in the world. When I was CDC director, Trump and I discussed this because we had 1.2 million Americans die of COVID. One of the highest death rates in the world. Right. And he would say, you know, Bob, you know, you're maybe you're misclassifying them. They're dying of a heart attack or a stroke. And I'd say, Mr. President, they're getting that heart attack because COVID causes microcoagulation and causes clots and, you know, and accelerates them to have a heart attack.

[00:17:03]

So they're really dying of they're dying of COVID. Well, why did Taiwan have less than 5000 deaths? And why do we have 1.2 million deaths? And so then the question is, how can that be when we had the most sophisticated medical response?

COVID's Impact on Chronically Ill

Yeah. All right. So the reason is our protoplasm was defective. We were chronically ill. And this virus, COVID, knew how to exploit chronic disease. If you were obese, if you had hypertension or diabetes, you were at risk for bad outcome. People didn't necessarily believe when I got the original data, CDC director, back in probably by March, April, I had data to show the number one risk factor for you dying from COVID was our number one and number two was obesity and hypertension. Why hypertension? Whether the hypertension was controlled or not. And it's because most people misunderstand COVID is really not a lung disease.

[00:18:03]

COVID is a blood vessel disease. And so our blood vessels that are less resilient, put it at risk for complications. And what blood vessels are less resilient? Well, for people like me, they're over 65. Or if you have type two diabetes, or if you have a history of hypertension. So this is really, it was a wake up call. It should be a wake up call. It's something Kennedy's latched onto. And I think not just as a political thing that he really believes it, how do we make America healthy again?

Maha and Kennedy's Health Focus

And I think that's why I'm very supportive of Maha. That's why I'm very supportive of Kennedy. That's why I think Kennedy is a great choice for secretary of health, because our health system needs to be transformed. I spent 50 years of my life becoming a major player in a disease system. Our current health system is designed to react to disease.

[00:19:02]

We need to create a health system. That's a health system. That's a design to promote health. And I think that's what Kennedy is about. When you kind of look at how did we get so obese? Well, I think he's onto something when he says, you know, maybe it's what we eat. It's not how much we eat. It's what we eat. And this highly processed food, there's very good data to show that you go on a highly processed food diet, and you compare it to another group of people that are taking the same calories, same food and everything, but it's not highly processed. One gains weight, one doesn't gain weight. So I think he's really onto that. And then there's the other issues of looking at other aspects of the food we eat with pesticides and other chemicals. And then you can get the same, the argument about what we drink. You know, our water is contaminated with PFAS and heavy metals and a lot of stuff. So America is in a sense, causing their chronic illness by a lot of the nutritional issues that we do.

[00:20:05]

So I think, you know, Kennedy focusing on trying to change that. When I was CDC director, I tried to get the fast food industry and the cereal industry to want to work with me on getting sugar out of the stuff, right? And get the fast food industries to stop their menu to go from regular to big, to giant, to jumbo, you know? Right.

[Del Bigtree]

Diving board on the side of the soda.

[Robert Redfield]

So why can't you just, you know, work with us? And it was, there was absolutely no interest in any of those industries at that time of trying to work with CDC to get public health. And I had this vision that we could have certain meals, like you go to McDonald's and you could get the meal with the seal of, this is good for your health. You could go, Pepsi could have a soft drink that says this is good for your health. Okay.

[00:21:00]

And so it's really unfortunate. I do think Kennedy is going to change all that. And you're starting to see a little of it already.

Challenges in Addressing Toxic Food

Why couldn't you though?

[Del Bigtree]

I mean, what is Kennedy stepping into that you as CDC director, you said I tried and, you know, I've sat in meetings as Bobby's interviewed a bunch of people too at times. And you hear that a lot. I hear that a lot. Really what seemed like really great people worked in government. They're like, Hey, I tried good luck. I actually think you might be able to do something. What is it that makes it so hard to, you know, keep toxic food out of our food supply?

[Robert Redfield]

Well, the first thing that the industry wasn't interested, you know, they didn't want to change. You know, I go back into the seventies and Dell, you probably know this without knowing this. I'm an activist in my own way. Okay. So in the seventies, I really brought up the issue. Just number of my friends that were lawyers that I thought we should do a class action suit against the tobacco industry. Cause I had too many patients that were in the intensive care unit, literally on ventilators, literally having their family put cigarettes into their ventilator so they could smoke while they were on a ventilator.

[00:22:08]

All right. And I realized they weren't doing that just because they did it. They did that because they were addicted, right? We were addicting people to nicotine and the tobacco industry was doing that. And then you, when you look at what happened more recently, when I was CDC director, uh, my grandchildren are the ones who brought me in. So granddad, granddad, you know, they're in elementary, they're in middle school. Granddad, everyone in middle school is, is vaping with Jules. Yeah. You know, granddad, you got to stop this. So I did a review and found out 37% of kids in high school were using tobacco products on a regular basis through these ruling products. And it was like 17% in middle school and elementary school. And I showed the president what happened in the last 10 years. And it went like this. Yeah. And I said, we've got to do something about this.

[00:23:01]

This is not in their interest in brain development, et cetera. So then I looked into it more and said, well, how did this really happen? So now you have a tobacco industry, which has made these vaping products. But what they did was in order to have those pods with enough tobacco, they changed it from the tobacco to a tobacco salt. Because if I gave you the tobacco that was in that pod, you couldn't take it. It was bitter. You'd sick everything. But if I turned it into a salt, you didn't care. So now I made it a salt. So now you weren't repelled by it, right? And then what did I do to go the next step? I added juicy fruit flavor, right? Grape. Grape. Watermelon, sure. Watermelon. So now it was an intentional decision, and I really think highly inappropriate to health of Americans, to addict these kids.

Tobacco Industry Tactics in Food

And we found out they now got as much tobacco from one pod that you would have gotten from 20 cigarettes.

[00:24:02]

Wow. All right?

[Del Bigtree]

Yeah.

[Robert Redfield]

And they showed, it was shown that within three to five days, kids were becoming addicted to tobacco products. And so we got the president to go after Jules and the thing and try to turn this around. You asked me, so what happened when I- Did you get anywhere with that? Yeah, we did get somewhere. They actually, the president pulled back those things and the FDA was slow on it, all right, but eventually got around. But I also suggested that when you looked at the mentholated cigarettes, what happened in the 70s, why were they mentholated? I said, they're doing the same thing. They're trying to addict, who? Women and African-Americans, they would go for mentholated cigarettes. Because most people, when they smoke, when they initially start, they're not really that excited about it, but you make a mentholated and you get more of that. I used to kid my patients when I used to listen to their lungs. I said, oh my God, you smoke cools. And they say, how do you know I smoke cools?

[00:25:01]

I said, because you got cools rails or you smoke Newports. And they said, how do you know that? I said, oh, because I can hear in your lung. They're telling me, it's not Marlboro's, it's not Winston's, but it was because the African-American community went for the mentholated cigarettes. But what happened when we finally got the tobacco industry under control? Remember in the 1960s and early 70s, the New England Journal of Medicine advertised cigarettes. Everyone said it wasn't practical to stop cigarettes. But by mid eighties, we're restricting cigarettes all over the place, as you know, and you can't smoke in public places. So what happened as the industry got called out on that, a lot of the scientists that they had working in the industry were there because they were working to how to keep cigarettes addicting. Right. What happened? Well, these companies now bought Kraft and they got into the food industry. And I'm going to tell you, I can't prove this.

[00:26:01]

Maybe someone does investigation go into it, but the same strategy of how do you make these foods more addicting is what I think happened. And now we got to get back to making food non-addicting and get the highly processed food out of it.

[Del Bigtree]

Is it is the difficulty? I mean, you know, we see we're talking about food right now. One of the big conversations, for instance, like Kellogg's, you know, Vani Hari has been out there. One of these people that's sort of protesting these chemical dyes, they're in Froot Loops here in America, but over in Europe, they're illegal. And we, you know, I think because of this campaign, because of Maha, Bobby Candy, Cali Means, a lot of these people are bringing attention to our food supply and saying, why are we allowing chemicals that are now proven to be either carcinogenic or, you know, endocrine disruptors in our food supply and not in Europe? How much of that is to blame?

[00:27:01]

Does the free market play into this? I mean, is this the sort of side effect, adverse effect, if you will, of freedom?

[Robert Redfield]

Possibly could. I agree with Cali and others, we need to have that stuff out of our food.

[Del Bigtree]

Yeah.

[Robert Redfield]

Okay. These are not pro-health products. I don't know, I haven't studied the the financial mechanics of it, but I have to assume it's cheaper for these companies to use that stuff and they make a better profit or they wouldn't do that. You see what I'm saying? Or it helps with that issue that we were just talking about. It pulls, it has an addictive pull that pulls people to say, I want more Trix. You know, I don't want one cup of Trix, I want two cups of Trix. You know, so I think we have to really go after, I'm not a big regulation person, you know, I told you.

[Del Bigtree]

Regulation of Food Additives

That's a question, because Robert I. Califf was just in front of Congress recently being grilled by Bernie Sanders. Bernie's saying, why are you not doing something about these chemicals?

[00:28:02]

I think the red dye was the conversation. He's like, we're trying, but you know, you have the industry, we can't, you know, we can't impose upon them the government if they say this helps us sell the product. Yeah.

[Robert Redfield]

I think there's a tendency to not want these regulations. Not so much necessarily in the Biden administration. So I don't know with Robert and others, but I do think that, you know, Trump would not be necessarily pro-regulation, but I think we're going to have to have regulation. I think we're going to have to have regulation and say these products are not going to be in American food and you guys got three to six months to change it. And that's just the way it's going to be. The other way we could do it, if we didn't use regulation, we could do it similar to the way we did it with cigarettes. When we want to move people towards healthy choices, all right, freedom, healthy choices. I could make unhealthy food more expensive, just like we did with cigarettes.

[00:29:02]

When I smoked a long time ago, my pack was 25 cents.

[Del Bigtree]

Yeah.

[Robert Redfield]

Well, that's not 25 cents anymore. So I can make it more expensive. And the extra expense would be taxes, which then could be used to support other health programs. The other thing we could force them to do is put a warning sign on food products that say these food products are not good for your health. Or you could do the opposite initially, put a sign on food products that are good for your health. Right. So if you buy these products, you go in, there's a Wheaties thing and there's a big thing with Bobby Kennedy's picture, you know, this is food, good food. Okay. All right. And it's a dollar cheaper than the guy next door that doesn't have that seal. Okay. So you could still do it with a freedom by using pricing and some type of influence of this is a good thing for you to do. And certain products might cross over the line.

[00:30:02]

You can put the warning, Hey, this is dangerous to your health. That's what we did to cigarettes. Ultimately we made them very expensive and we made it very clear it's dangerous to your health. And I think, but you could also just say, listen, I don't want to take forever for that to happen. I'm just going to regulate that this red dye is no longer allowed to be in any food product.

[Del Bigtree]

Is that the faster way to go? I think it's faster. I mean, it seems to me the fastest. I mean, I kind of like one of the things I've been thinking about is why not warning labels? I mean, because you have this, you have this general, what do they call it? Grass, generally recognized as safe, which is sort of this throw your chemical into our food supply. And we're all just going to assume it's safe until there's enough lawsuits to figure out that it's not, which is a really strange way to approach it. But it just seems to me, if you want that level of sort of flexibility, then you immediately get the grass warning label, which is, this has not been tested for safety.

[Robert Redfield]

And some things show that it could be. When I was CDC director, one of the mysteries I had to do is I worked up in the Midwest.

[00:31:03]

I think it was Illinois, Indiana. I had a number of young people that were bleeding to death and we didn't know why they were bleeding to death. And what we ultimately found out was they were using synthetic marijuana, but to make it more realistic, they were mixing it with vegetation and the vegetation had an anticoagulant in it that made your blood not coagulate. Totally unregulated. Killed a number of people. So I don't know the answer, Del, but I would say that clearly putting warning labels or positive labels or some combination of positive versus warning and pricing is one way that you could change. I do think MAHA could be a big help in this in getting suburban housewives and mothers and grandmothers to say, I don't want my grandkids eating. I have 14 grandkids. I don't want my grandkids eating this stuff. And that's part of the MAHA prevention efforts.

[00:32:02]

There's a whole other effort we can talk about is approaching chronic disease and transforming our health system into a health system rather than a disease system. But the prevention side is really important and it's going to start with food and getting these highly processed procedures out of our food supply and getting targeted chemicals out of our food supply.

[Del Bigtree]

Process of Implementing Food Regulations

What's the process? Let's say you want to make food more expensive. You're the CDC director. How does that work? Who do you go to? How does this process work? You're in government. Do you have to lobby for that? Is there an internal mechanism saying, I want to add a tax to Froot Loops, let's say?

[Robert Redfield]

Yeah, the only way I would be able to do it from CDC would be able to convince the Secretary of Health that this is something that we need to do. And then he would have to either convince Congress or the President or both. You see what I'm saying?

[00:33:00]

The President could do an executive order or he can convince Congress to go in. Now, I would rather see us do this. And I think Kennedy has the skill set to pull this off. I would rather do this and Cali has the skill set to pull this off. I would rather do this in a partnership with Big Ag, with the partnership with Kellogg, when they realize their markets are going to go south. If they don't get with it, everyone's going to buy cereal now from Whole Foods. Or they're not going to go to Giant and Safeway anymore. Or they partner with us to make their products able to have that seal, that they have the seal of the Secretary of Health that this product... The Maha seal. Yeah, the Maha seal. This is healthy. And I would rather go with the healthy seal than the skull and crossbones if I could. But there may be some products you've got to pull out the skull and crossbones.

[00:34:01]

But I think that's the way to do it. The other way that will help move it faster is if there's a price differential. If we finally decide, although we don't traditionally tax food, we finally decide we're going to tax unhealthy food, just like we tax alcohol and we tax tobacco. So in general, food's not going to be taxed unless you buy unhealthy food and it's going to be taxed.

[Del Bigtree]

Subsidies for Processed Foods

There's an argument that's being made. I'm curious if it's true or not, which is that these processed foods are getting much greater subsidies from the government through food stamp programs than, say, organic food. Organic food's not really getting any government subsidies and the crappy food is. Is that true?

[Robert Redfield]

I don't know the answer. I would defer to Callie because I'm sure studied this pretty carefully. I don't think my elementary school food programs have contracts with Whole Foods.

[00:35:04]

Right. Okay. So they probably have contracts with somebody else that isn't Whole Foods. You see what I'm saying? So there may be some truth to it. I just don't know. But that is another way to get it out that you actually are subsidizing the good food, not subsidizing the unhealthy food. I do suspect if you take it apart, we probably are on subsidizing unhealthy food, but I would defer to Callie and people that know that space better than me.

[Del Bigtree]

RFK Jr.'s Vaccine Position

So let's get into the space you do know very well, which is the one that Robert Kennedy Jr. finds himself probably, you know, the most controversies around vaccines. What is your understanding of his vaccine position?

[Robert Redfield]

Yeah, for me, and I've talked to him about this. I'm of the view, and you may disagree with me, we always have a right to disagree on issues. That's what's so important that we have dialogue, whether we disagree.

[00:36:02]

I think what Kennedy is not anti-vax, and I've said it publicly in my view, and it's coming from me, who's considered a very pro-vaccine kind of guy.

[Del Bigtree]

Yeah.

[Robert Redfield]

Like, I consider vaccines one of the most powerful gifts of science to modern medicine. I've said that many times. That said, it's not one-sided. And where I see Kennedy is, he wants transparency about vaccines. Safety? Put it out there. Transparency. Don't call me anti-vax just because I question the safety of a vaccine. Show me the safety data. Right. And he wants transparency about efficacy. Don't tell me this vaccine works. Show me the data. And I do think, you know, that it's not unreasonable to say, I want to review in a transparent way what we really know 2025 about the safety and efficacy of this vaccine, or this vaccine, or this vaccine, or this vaccine.

[00:37:04]

And maybe we identify some vaccines that really have made an impact on the human condition, but they could be better. And then we could task groups to explore how to make a better vaccine, better in terms of safety profile. You know, like we saw recently with the polio discussion. I think there is a reason to pull back the Sabin vaccine. There's two polio vaccines, the Salk vaccine and the Sabin vaccine. In the United States now, we've pretty much switched to the Salk vaccine. When my kids were growing up, I wanted them to get the Salk vaccine, but the policy was for them to get the Sabin vaccine. The Salk vaccine is a killed vaccine, period. The Sabin vaccine is a live attenuated vaccine. The problem with the Sabin vaccine is about 1 in 500,000 to 1 in 750,000 people who get the Sabin vaccine get polio.

[00:38:06]

And so, do you really need to do that when we have an alternative that nobody gets polio? Now, I was on the committee for eradication of polio in the world, along with Gates Foundation, and along with Tedros WHO, and Rotary, and UNICEF. I was one of the six members of the board. And we had gotten polio in the world down to 22 cases in Afghanistan. And then the next year, unfortunately, we had more cases in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and they started passing it around. So, we got up... Did they change the vaccine? No. What they did, what was originally done, and I don't agree with this decision, and this is why you should have transparency and debate about these decisions. And even my folks at CDC totally disagree with me. When we went to the eradication of polio, they used the Sabin vaccine because the Sabin vaccine had the potential advantage that if I vaccinate my children, but you don't vaccinate your children, my children may excrete that vaccine and end up vaccinating your children.

[00:39:18]

The only challenge is my children have the risk of getting polio. So, the world kind of went with the Sabin vaccine with the idea that it could bring herd immunity because it would also serve to vaccinate the people whose family members decided not to vaccinate.

[Del Bigtree]

Well, there's a real conversation right now about self-spreading vaccines. That's right. It's actually a concern of mine and the work that I do, but that is... I mean, we act like it's brand new, but really you could describe Sabin as a self-spreading vaccine.

[Robert Redfield]

Self-spreading vaccine, and it was embraced by the scientific community and public health community as superior to the Salk vaccine. I happen to know Jonas Salk. I met both Salk and Sabin during my career. I have a lot of respect for Salk.

[00:40:00]

I was always disappointed that people went with the Sabin vaccine and they really didn't give Salk the credit that he should have gotten. When the AIDS epidemic happened, I was aggressive in trying to promote the Salk vaccine because I didn't want HIV immunosuppressed patients getting an attenuated polio vaccine. But the bottom line is the world went in a different direction.

[Del Bigtree]

Polio Vaccines: Salk vs. Sabin

Now, just to be clear, here in America, we use Salk. We use Salk. Vaccines. Sabin's what we use in the Middle East.

[Robert Redfield]

Long around the world, but we use in America, and I don't remember the exact date we switched. It was probably right around 2000 or shortly after 2000, America embraced the Salk vaccine. But prior to that, when my kids were growing up, it was a Sabin vaccine.

[Del Bigtree]

Doesn't the Salk issue, I mean, it doesn't stop transmission as well, right?

[Robert Redfield]

Well, they argue that. Now, let's go back to transparency. Show me the data. My CDC folks would argue, well, Bob, you don't get mucosal immunity to the same level you do with the Sabin vaccine.

[00:41:00]

Show me that that has a clinical real impact. What we do know is what the Sabin vaccine, when I was CDC director, they wanted to announce that we finally got rid of serotype 2 in Africa, and wild-type polio was gone from Africa. Only place we still had wild-type polio was Afghanistan. I had a problem making a big hoopla about that, because when you really looked at polio in Africa, we had a lot of polio in Africa, but it was all caused by the vaccine. I agree. And I said, why are we celebrating? And what part of that problem was, again, some aired public health decisions from my point of view, where when serotype 2 started to disappear, they modified the vaccine that we used. And so now, if you look around the world right now, we have a lot of polio outbreaks, but they're all due to the Sabin vaccine reverting.

[Del Bigtree]

Which I think, though, begs the question.

[00:42:02]

I mean, you're right, some mistakes made. I've gone to some of the CDC meetings. We started going to the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practice meetings years ago, and there's a lot that people don't see there. But this is a much bigger concern than it's ever talked about in the news. I mean, this is a big concern, because though we got down to 22 cases, as you said, it's really starting to spread now. I mean, you're really starting to see a spread. I think last year, if I remember correctly, you can correct me, I'm just a journalist, but my understanding is that they said that someone that is one of these people that has, I guess, contracted polio from the vaccination or contact with someone vaccinated can be a carrier and be spreading it for up to a year before they're symptomatic.

[Robert Redfield]

There's no doubt they can carry it. I don't know exactly how long, but there's no doubt that they can spread it. And there's no doubt that there are active polio outbreaks all around the world, all whose initial reason they're there was the polio vaccine.

[00:43:08]

Doesn't mean that the polio vaccine is a bad vaccine and we shouldn't use it. I would argue it means we should re-evaluate the safety of the polio vaccines and prioritize the vaccine that's safe, which is the killed vaccine.

[Del Bigtree]

But now you have a concern. We are starting to see polio in New York City in the sewer system. Is that, is, I mean, you know, is the understanding of that because we have people traveling in now that are carriers and it's somehow spreading because we're not seeing cases necessarily, but we are seeing it existing in the sewage system.

[Robert Redfield]

Yeah, when you do water testing, you know, which is an important surveillance mechanism. Two ways, two ways it's coming in. If it's wild type polio, which we can tell, it's coming in through cases from Pakistan and and Afghanistan. And we have had a lot of people come back, as you know, from Afghanistan.

[00:44:01]

If it's, if it's, are you saying that through soldiers then? Are you saying the soldiers might be bringing in? Not only the soldiers, but all the civilians that we're reputting back in. The second thing it could be is it could be from some of the outbreaks that we're having around the world from the vaccine associated polio. Science can distinguish between those. Okay. And, and I haven't really studied the New York, you know, my understanding, I thought was the original New York thing that they talked about was wild type polio, but I don't know. You'd have to look at that, but either would be possible. All right. Where I, where I do think, you know, Bobby would benefit and, and, and his team is, is, is in their communication strategy to be able to distinguish between an effective polio vaccine that has been safe, right. And efficacious and a polio vaccine that has been shown now, although it may have been important back in 1960.

[00:45:05]

Now it seems to be a vaccine that's associated with polio outbreaks. Now you raise a point. If the Salk vaccine somehow is inferior in efficacy. Yeah. Show me the data. I don't think we have a data. I think we have opinions because I know at CDC.

[Del Bigtree]

So we'll get into this and how do you get data? I mean, how do we, once these vaccines are on the market, right? Polio, everyone's getting Salk vaccine here in America. There is this concern that the reason we're seeing it in sewers is someone must be carrying it and their bodies aren't fighting it. We're watching this with COVID.

[Robert Redfield]

And I should say, we do see that. And just to answer that to yourself, there are situations that we do see that. For example, people that are immune deficient with AIDS, and if they do have polio, they can shed that virus a lot longer. I mean, probably longer than a year. Okay. So there are examples where some individuals can shed these viruses much longer than the average individual.

[00:46:04]

Post-Marketing Vaccine Safety Studies

You know, when you talk about, and this is something we can talk about, you know, how Kennedy decides to have greater vigilance about vaccine safety, you could argue the importance of post-marketing, what we would call phase four post-marketing studies that reaffirm the product safety, reaffirm the product's efficacy. You know, one of the problems, and I'm controversial on this, people in the industry don't like me for what I'm about to say. My son is probably telling me not to say it right now in my ear, but I don't think the vaccine industry should have immunity.

[Del Bigtree]

I was going to ask you that.

[Robert Redfield]

I think they should have responsibility, like any other manufacturer of any other product, for their product. And I'm particularly concerned about this now because, you know, my clinical practice right now, which I'm still in two half days a week, is largely COVID and long COVID.

[00:47:03]

But among my quote long COVID patients are people that don't have long COVID, but they have mRNA vaccine injury, right? And it's, you know, there's not a clear path for them to have their injury recognized and compensated. And I think that's wrong. I think hopefully Kennedy will have a critical review, not saying that the mRNA vaccines aren't safe, not saying they shouldn't. Let's just have an objective review by the FDA. Marty, you've got to review these products. Let's see the safety data. Don't tell me you're holding it off till 2026. No, I want the safety data out there. You know, a lot of the reasons people like me, you know, would get hit for talking about vaccine side effects is they went against the policy that they wanted to get everybody vaccinated.

[Del Bigtree]

Vaccine Mandates and Public Trust

Well, this, I mean, this gets to, I think, the biggest problem we have with this product is essentially you're, it only works, at least is how we're told, it only works if everyone takes it, right?

[00:48:07]

[Robert Redfield]

Which part are we talking about now?

[Del Bigtree]

Any vaccines, just in general. I would say that the sales pitch on vaccines, one of the greatest sales pitches ever developed for a product, which is this only works if everyone takes it. And, you know, a drug on the other hand is to protect yourself. This, we all have to protect each other. And so you get into this confidence game. And it seems to me where it's why you need liability protection. We don't want to be seeing the court system saying that anyone got injured. There's like this real thought that people can't know that injury is real. I mean, I feel like most doctors in America don't believe anyone gets injured by vaccines. Is that, am I overstating that?

[Robert Redfield]

I think you're overstating it, but I do think there's, there, we need to have greater recognition of vaccine industry, injury as a reality of vaccine use.

[00:49:04]

All right. I've always said, I just mentioned to polio, there is some people that get polio, that's an injury for the vaccine. All right. So all vaccines probably have benefit, the ones that are approved, but they also have the potential for injury. And when you look at the COVID vaccines, which I know very well, I was part of the board for Operation Warp Speed. I'm still proud of the fact of what Trump accomplished, those vaccines being approved as rapidly as they were. I do believe, and some people have argued with me, but I do believe we saved the lives of many vulnerable people in nursing homes and assisted living, those of us over 65 years of age with diabetes or hypertension. That said, those vaccines had no business being mandated in people under the age of 50, period. All right.

[00:50:00]

Well, why mandate it at all? They shouldn't have been mandated. Right. I mean, even if there is an advantage to the elderly. They shouldn't have been mandated. That's an individual choice. I agree with you. They should have never been mandated. All right. And as you point out, the vaccine should have been communicated to the American public, I think, honestly, which is these vaccines do not prevent infection. So that argument, get vaccinated so you don't infect your grandma. No, being vaccinated doesn't stop you from infecting grandma.

[Del Bigtree]

COVID Vaccine and Transmission

Okay. So let's go right there because you were right there in developing the COVID vaccine. At what point did you recognize this vaccine doesn't stop transmission? Beginning. And no evidence from the very beginning, meaning phase one trial, two trials.

[Robert Redfield]

There are trials, there's regulatory trials that both Moderna and Pfizer prevented, presented no evidence of preventing infection. Right. What they did do, and I think really do have benefit to people that are at risk for bad outcomes, they did show that they decreased the likelihood of hospitalization and death.

[00:51:14]

All right. And I can say from practical persons, when I got out of CDC, I was asked by Governor Hogan to be his chief public health advisor. And I told the governor I'd be honored to do it under one condition. He asked me what it was. And I said, I don't want to be paid because I don't want the Baltimore sun coming after me for everything I do. Okay. So I'll work for free and I'll be your public health advisor. And I did. And Hogan did a great job. When the vaccine came out in December, I think December 10th, we pretty much had all of our nursing home residents vaccinated before the end of January. Really aggressive. And we had had a lot of hospitalizations and death in our nursing home. I mean, I'm talking significant numbers. And what I saw was all of a sudden the hospitalizations and deaths in my nursing home residents plummeted.

[00:52:03]

[Del Bigtree]

Could one argue though, that you'd already had the fire take out all of the dry wheat, if you will? I mean, COVID had already ravaged the nursing homes. So those with strong immune systems maybe had already developed immunity. I mean, there's a lot of arguments.

[Robert Redfield]

Some people could argue that. I don't think that was the answer because the amount of... Well, I don't think that's the answer, but you could argue that. But what I did show was that come April and May, all of a sudden my nursing home patients were back in the hospital and dying again. So I said to Hogan, I said, I don't think they have immunity anymore. I want to go ahead and test them for their immunity to COVID, whether they got it from the previous infection or whether they got it from the vaccine. And we tested, I think about 750 people.

[00:53:00]

Nursing homes were very cooperative. And we found out that almost two thirds of them didn't have any detectable immunity. So then I went to Hogan and I said, we got to revaccinate these people. They have no immunity. And of course, CDC said, you can't do that. We're not recommending that. FDA said, you can't do that. We're not recommending it. NIH said, you can't do that. We're not recommending it. And I turned to Governor Hogan and I said, CDC and FDA and NIH aren't really responsible for the health of people who live in Maryland. We are. And he had a lot of faith in me and a lot of trust in me. And I told him I thought we needed to revaccinate the people, which we did. And within 30 days, the hospitalization rates plummeted and the deaths plummeted. So I've pretty good empirical data now that this vaccine works. The problem is it only works probably for three to six months.

[Del Bigtree]

Vaccine Efficacy Duration

Well, and you have really some of the best science, as you described it.

[00:54:00]

I haven't seen that. But if you see it go, you drop it, it comes. But if you do that twice, it's pretty compelling evidence.

[Robert Redfield]

But I'll tell you, the vaccine doesn't last. Okay.

[Del Bigtree]

So the vaccine- Well, it's even, I mean, there's a lot of science showing it's even worse than that. It has a reverse efficacy.

[Robert Redfield]

There are some people, there's some data to suggest that it may even facilitate infection at some point. And there are viral systems that do that. We call it enhancing antibody. It's at a certain level. So I have this much antibody, it doesn't enhance. When I get this much antibody, because it has lots of little antibodies that do different things. And when you get to this level, it does enhance. So there is that possibility that some level of immunity actually makes you more susceptible to reinfection. So I'm not going to argue that that's impossible. I see it. If you look at flaviviruses and dengue, it's very operational. I happen to be vaccinated against COVID, so is my wife. We get vaccinated about every six months.

[00:55:02]

We don't use the mRNA vaccine. Because when I look at COVID and long COVID, which I have lots of patients now, I'm trying to understand what's making them sick. I think it's the spike protein, which is a special protein that the COVID virus has. And that protein has a very high affinity for a receptor in your body, which lines all your blood vessels and everywhere. And I think your body doesn't get rid of it very easy. It stays around a lot longer than Fauci used to try to tell people.

[Del Bigtree]

So... Well, I mean, we actually designed it to do that, right?

[Robert Redfield]

We inserted the pseudouridine. We made it so that it will last longer. It defies some sanity, I think. So it lasts longer. And without the recognition, but lasting longer means it can bind to our receptors and last longer on our receptors that cause problems. Right. All right. So now I know that. And now I have a vaccine that is the mRNA vaccine, and I use this vaccine, help develop it.

[00:56:08]

I don't use it anymore in my patients. And this is one of the things I can think could be relooked at about safety of the current vaccines 2025. That vaccine, when I give you an mRNA vaccine, I don't know how much mRNA you make. I turn your body into a factory, but I have no controls over that factory. I mean, you can make a lot, you can make a little, and you can make it for a week, you can make it for six months. And Fauci and others used to argue that it doesn't last. Well, no, we now know some of these patients are making spike protein three, six months later. So I've switched in my thing, and where I think there's a safer vaccine, where I use the protein vaccine. It's made by Novavax. So when I give you the COVID vaccine, I'm giving you dead protein. Your body's not turned into a factory.

[00:57:00]

I know what the decay curve is of that dead protein in your body. And I just think it's a safer way. So like my wife and I, the last two or three vaccines we've got are the Novavax protein vaccine. And that's what I give for my patients. That said, I don't think it's unreasonable to go re-examine the safety of what we know about these vaccines.

[Del Bigtree]

mRNA Vaccine Concerns

You have the opposite happening though. You have mRNA, you have new mRNA vaccines that are trying to run and stay safe based on the COVID vaccine, which has an emergency use authorization.

[Robert Redfield]

You just saw the Biden administration just gave Moderna over $176 million to make a bird flu vaccine that way. I'm not sure that technology is going to stand the test of time.

[Del Bigtree]

I agree. But I mean, there's a danger when you have a technology that we don't know a whole lot about. As you said, it seems ad hoc, willy-nilly. It's lasting in some people longer than others.

[Robert Redfield]

It's a fair debate that should be done transparently. I was on the Warp Speed board and we reviewed over 120 vaccines and we selected six, two vector vaccines, one was AstraZeneca, one was J&J, two mRNA vaccines, Moderna and Pfizer, and two protein vaccines, Novavax and a company that was GSK and Sophie Pasteur together.

[00:58:23]

Five of those six vaccines made it over the goal line. The J&J, I mean the GlaxoSmithKline, Sanofi didn't make it over the goal line. They had some issues in the way they designed the trial.

[Del Bigtree]

But there were some- I just think that it was the design of the trial and not necessarily the way you said that I find kind of funny.

[Robert Redfield]

Like if they had designed a better trial, well, they could have because I think they had trouble in the immunogenicity in older adults, which we know older adults have immunogenicity problems in general. And the way they designed it, they were over here.

[00:59:03]

[Del Bigtree]

But in a way, they should do it for older adults because that's the group that we're really trying- Well, I mean, look, when we look at the trials for Pfizer and Moderna, I mean, most of the high-risk groups aren't in the trial. Right.

[Robert Redfield]

And so GSK was more the way we would like to see it, okay? They put their high-risk groups in there. And they didn't get over the goal line because their immunogenicity was there. But let me- What I was going to say is when you- Debbie Birx and I were on the board and we voted for the protein vaccines to be included. And we didn't win. The committee accepted the two vector and the two mRNA. And part of the reason we didn't win is everyone didn't think it was sexy enough, all right? The mRNA was new, it was sexy.

[01:00:00]

[Del Bigtree]

The vector- Does the protein have the same ability? mRNA seems to be offering a real opportunity to vaccine makers in that, I mean, suddenly we can make a vaccine almost overnight. I mean, you just... Does the protein vaccine have the ability to ramp up as quickly?

[Robert Redfield]

It's a little longer. However, the reason Birx and I were big advocates of the protein vaccine, we both did vaccine research. He worked for me for a number of years in the army, is we saw that this was a vaccine that needed to go global. And the ability to manufacture protein vaccines was simple. It was straightforward. It was technology we've used for over 50 years. We know it works. And it's going to be cheap. And I could make a plan to make this vaccine in Nairobi or anywhere I want to. And you know that the mRNA vaccines have been trying to have a plan in Kenya and in South Africa, and they've all busted, right?

[01:01:00]

The mRNA vaccines, you need freezers at 100- What happened to the freezers? You need freezers 180 degrees, minus 80. My vaccine, you don't need it. You can put it in the back of your car. So I wanted the protein vaccines. We lost, largely because there was a pretty heavy bias by other people in the room that if it wasn't new, it couldn't be valuable. Birx and I felt this is 50-year technology, let's go with it. And so you raise a good point. At what point does new platform technology get widely positioned? Because for example, with the mRNA vaccines, there's issue about what I've talked about, prolonged production. We don't know if this mRNA gets somehow stabilized in mitochondria or somewhere in cytoplasm. There's also concerns that have been raised about other nucleic acid that may be in those vaccines that is active.

[01:02:02]

You've heard the Europeans are doing a lot of that right now. So I do think, you know, it's not unreasonable to have some type of pause around introducing new platform technology into humans. Clearly, as CDC director, having the mRNA technology available to me was important. Because when I was down there, one of the reasons I became CDC director, I had a premonition that we were going to have a respiratory pandemic in the world. And I actually thought it's going to be bird flu. I didn't propose it was going to be coronavirus. And I still think we're at big risk for bird flu. And the beautiful thing about the older technology was it was going to take me six to 18 months to get a vaccine. Whereas with the mRNA technology, it literally could happen within 30 to 60 days.

[Del Bigtree]

mRNA Technology and Speed

I mean, that to me is what makes this, I mean, you see an incentive. You see an incentive around this technology.

[01:03:00]

It was having mRNA, I'm talking about, was having what appeared to be really difficult times in the animal trials. Moderna had been working on it some time. The animals were showing increased infection. Some of what I think we may be seeing, which is net, you know, reverse efficacy. You had animals that seem to be having problems with the antibodies, you know, causing disease. But whatever the case, it just seems like warp speed, you know, understood we're in a pandemic, we need to get something out, but to rush a brand new technology. And as you're pointing out, there are still so many questions about what that thing is doing.

[Robert Redfield]

When we did bring it out, remember though, we did bring it out at that time as an emergency authorization. And, you know, I argued, I didn't win the ballgame. Once we had protein vaccine that could do the same thing, I would have liked to see us move to the protein vaccine.

[01:04:03]

All right. I'm still going to argue that we should move to the protein vaccine. You know, hopefully, Marty, we'll take a good look at this. And Kennedy, we'll take a good look at this and just say, let's objectively review what we know. I am not excited about what I've heard, and I don't know this for a fact, but I've seen in the news, the request that this data not be released until 2026, you know, the safety data from the FDA. I think that's wrong. It should be released immediately. Okay. And I've heard even Pfizer's even asked to keep it, you know, back even longer.

[Del Bigtree]

But just sort of full disclosure, my other nonprofit informed consent action network brought the lawsuit that released the Pfizer data. I brought the lawsuit that released the Moderna data. We brought the lawsuit that released the v-safe data that was the CDC's creation, the v-safe app. And have you gotten all that released? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's coming in tranches and they keep lying about how much there is. We keep thinking the data's coming.

[Robert Redfield]

Yeah. And I think there needs to be transparent.

[01:05:01]

[Del Bigtree]

Transparency in Vaccine Data

Absolutely. Why? I mean, why should a nonprofit have to be sealing for this information?

[Robert Redfield]

Well, the government should, this is a place where Marty can step in and Kennedy can step in. But I still do believe there's benefit from the COVID vaccine in protecting life for highly vulnerable individuals. That said, if it's used properly, and when I say use properly, it means you probably have to be vaccinated every three to six months. And there are some people that I respect that don't agree with me at all that think vaccinating people that many times is problematic in and of itself. Okay. But we need studies on that. But you need to study, right? You need to study. I can say that my patients, you know, that I'm still following many of them. I haven't had in my clinical practice now, I haven't had a death. All right. So I'm happy for that. It doesn't mean that what I'm doing is helping them stay alive, but we're still losing 100 to 150 people a day from COVID in the United States.

[01:06:04]

So people are still dying. And part of the way we can keep people alive and nobody should die from COVID is if we get them diagnosed and get them on antiviral therapy that works. That's what we should be doing. And it's disappointing to me that we still haven't positioned the antiviral side of the house to the degree that we should.

[Del Bigtree]

A lot of people would argue that's because this vaccine, this sort of addiction to what vaccines, mRNA technologies can do, there's a, I mean, this is a whole new frontier. You can start vaccinating for every bacteria and virus on the planet.

[Robert Redfield]

I think at the end of the day, Del, the mRNA technology will not be used in vaccines. Okay. Let's fast forward three years. But I do think the mRNA technology will be used in therapeutics. Well, that's where it comes from, right? I mean, but I think eventually it might provide therapeutics in a way that's better.

[01:07:03]

For example, I can envision you have, you know, we have a patient that has a disease that the current pharmaceutical cost to treat them in a year is $250,000. I can envision creating an mRNA that teaches their body to make that product for nothing. Yeah. And so I can see that there might be a role in certain diseases, that mRNA technology. And I ultimately think the mRNA technology is going to be used for therapeutics. When we have a choice of using the mRNA technology for some potential prevention or for treating someone with a life-saving disease, remember the molecules that we need to use to make that mRNA. It's basically four molecules, right? And it's just chemical. It's not biological. So you and I could stockpile those molecules for the next 50 years once, you know, if we raised them.

[01:08:03]

And when there's a demand on those molecules, I think people are going to opt for the demand to be to treat and save lives than to use them for maybe something that may be prevented, particularly if there's an alternative technology like protein that we could use for that. But we'll see. But I do think I'm glad you've succeeded in getting... It's sad that you had to do that. But I do think all the data has to be released. It has to be reviewed. You know, it'd be great to try to find, if we can find, a truly independent group of people to look at it. And this is the other complex because a lot of people are not totally independent. You know, they've got conflicts, as you know. If you look at even the advisory boards, you know, I agree with Kennedy, I think you said it, and others have said it, we should make sure, maybe Trump said it, we should make sure the people on the advisory boards don't have conflicts. Yeah. You know, I agree, you know, and that's not that easy because most of the real experts have conflicts.

[01:09:01]

[Del Bigtree]

Right. I mean, you would have, I mean, based on your background, just, and you're very, you know, highly qualified, you know, you've developed vaccines, you have, you know, so...

[Robert Redfield]

And you have to decide where that conflict goes, you know, how long do I have to be out from taking money from pharmaceutical industry before you finally let me out? Although I am a chief medical officer for an antiviral company, so you might say, well, I have a conflict because I...

[Del Bigtree]

Trying to sell them right here. Yeah, I'm an antiviral. You're giving this right to our audience, trying to sell antiviral. No, I mean, that is, it's the difficulty of the whole thing. I want to get into, you know, how we establish safety, right?

Safety Tests and Childhood Vaccine Program

Because I think this is a big conversation that RFK is having and, you know, there's a huge pushback. As you pointed out, all he wants to do is review the vaccines that we already have. There seems to be a real... I've been talking to reporters, I'm shocked at how panicked they seem to be about this idea. But what is your understanding of the, you know, safety tests that have been done, especially on where Bobby's focused, the Childhood Vaccine Program?

[01:10:07]

[Robert Redfield]

Yeah, I think in general, many of the Childhood Vaccine Program safety data is probably pretty historic, right? It goes back a long time. And the real safety data that was in those original vaccine studies is pretty much limited to the volunteers that were in those original safety studies. And they are usually pretty self-limited. You know, whether the safety study is continued in a vaccine, is it continued for a month? Is it continued for six months? Is it continued for a year? And what are the parameters, you know, that are looking at? Is the safety self-reported, which a lot of vaccine studies do? They just call you up on the phone and say, how do you feel? I feel fine. Or is it really a little more investigatory?

[01:11:02]

This is where you and I talked about, it's not hard to see that one could require post-marketing studies for these products that may have to continue for 10 years. Where you have a cohort of individuals for, you know, for multiple years to look at, you know, the safety profile of these products. I don't think we do that. I think there's short-term safety profiles that have happened and people don't re-look at it. And you already know, almost anybody that says, I want to re-look at the safety profile, immediately they get classified as anti-vax. I know, I just want to look at the safety profile.

[Del Bigtree]

Establishing Safety for New Vaccines

What would be the appropriate way to establish safety for a new vaccine?

[Robert Redfield]

Well, you have to have some criteria.

[01:12:04]

And I think the FDA is going to define that criteria. How many people they want to see and what diverse background by age, sex, you know, in particular, and if they want to include high-risk individuals or not, and how many people that has to entail and for how long. And it's an arbitrary decision, you know, and some... Why is it arbitrary?

[Del Bigtree]

It seems like at this point in modern society, we should have established some general concept of how you test a product.

[Robert Redfield]

All I'm going to say when I say arbitrary, I'm going to say it's an opinion that someone lays down and this is what my criteria is going to be to give you your initial safety. All right? There's going to be boundaries around that decision based on sample size and the different type of individuals that you put into it.

[01:13:08]

I do think we should recognize from the beginning that all vaccines are going to have side effects and all vaccines are capable potentially of causing vaccine injury. This is why I'm not an advocate for no accountability for these products. I think there has to be accountability.

[Del Bigtree]

Vaccine Liability and Mandates

But their argument, you know, all the way to the Supreme Court for needing liability is exactly that reason, right? Supreme Court says unavoidably unsafe. So because the government's mandating the product and forcing everybody to take it, the industry is saying, hey, you can't make us pay for injury. You're the one making everybody take this product. It's definitely going to injure some people.

[Robert Redfield]

Yeah, you can't mandate. And if you do mandate, I agree you're down that slippery slope.

[Del Bigtree]

Yeah.

[Robert Redfield]

I'm not an advocate of mandating vaccines. Okay. I think that from a public health point of view, and I'm a big vaccine advocate, let me sit down and explain to you the advantage of this vaccine for you or for your children.

[01:14:11]

For example, how old are you? Me, 54. Okay. So you're still young. But if you were 65, I would tell you, I think you'd benefit from getting the RSV vaccine. You may say, doc, I don't want to get the RSV. And then I explain to you why I think it's in your benefit. And then you would tell me, but I still don't want to take it. That's your choice. Right. Next time I see you for your visit, I'd say, hey, have you thought more about that RSV vaccine? And you'd say, yeah, I thought more about it. I just don't want to take it. That's your choice. All right. So I might remind you how many thousand people died of RSV in your age group that year, and then tell you to think about it again, and you don't want to get it. We have to leave it to individual choice. I agree completely. I argue when I was CDC director that all we did by mandating the COVID vaccine, which I was very much against, was reinforce vaccine hesitancy.

[01:15:03]

Because if I tell you, you have to take what you've already told me you don't want to take, and I say, no, no, you have to take it. All I do is reinforce you to dig in that you don't want to take it. All this forcing the firefighters and the policemen and the hospital workers and the military was a huge mistake. Huge. Huge mistake. And is one of the reasons you came to me earlier. This is one of the reasons I think we have a higher degree of vaccine hesitancy in the country today than we had when I took office in 2019 or 18. But I think you're going to define some norms of what you want to see for vaccine safety. What I'm going to tell you, whatever norm you define, I think you need to have probably, if it's something that we're going to really put routine in the American public, like forever, I think you probably have to have post-marketing safety studies for at least a decade to reaffirm that you didn't miss something.

[01:16:04]

[Del Bigtree]

Yeah, but the danger of post-marketing is, let's say like an mRNA vaccine, you give it to, I mean, it's giving something to everybody and then just watching the market, you're like, oops, our bad, that just created infertility.

[Robert Redfield]

No, but once we started, I'm just saying, I think, and I'm not saying I have the pharmaceutical company have to do it themselves. Maybe it's the FDA that has to do a follow-up evaluation of whether this product has some unappreciated safety concerns, like you just mentioned, infertility.

[Del Bigtree]

Placebo Trials in Vaccine Development

Before we get to post-marketing though, I mean, let me ask you, because this is a huge debate that I've been watching Bobby have, I've had it. Do you need a placebo? Do you need a, in order to establish a safety baseline for, I mean, it's how we do most drugs with a vaccine, should there be a placebo group, a comparator that is holding onto a true safety baseline?

[01:17:00]

Is that necessary to establish safety or is there another way to get safety without that?

[Robert Redfield]

Yeah, that's a good question. I think the advantage is having a control group is you kind of outline what the background noise is. Yeah. And it lets you see if anything is occurring in the vaccinated group at a higher frequency. Yeah. If you don't have that, you really don't know. Now, there are some products, including vaccines, I'm sure, that you could show that they have a real safety problem. I know a friend of mine was developing a drug for treating a viral infection at NIH and he gave it to 11 people and I think, I can't remember now, but I think four of them died. It had a safety problem.

[Del Bigtree]

Yeah.

[Robert Redfield]

Right. In general, the safest way to understand if there's safety concerns is to have a comparative group.

[01:18:00]

So, you know, have you looked at the childhood? No, I have not. Schedule at all? No. I mean, I have. I mean, the schedule historically, but I haven't really studied it in recent times.

[Del Bigtree]

So it's fair to say that the guy that was head of CDC, who's in charge of the recommended schedule for children's vaccines, but none were added. I mean, I guess COVID was, but not during your time.

[Robert Redfield]

Yeah, but I didn't agree with that.

[Del Bigtree]

You didn't agree with that.

[Robert Redfield]

And I don't agree with it now.

[Del Bigtree]

So if it's not being added, like where is... Before I get into this, you know, as you step into CDC, we think of CDC really as that childhood schedule is a huge part of it, but it's not really on your radar.

[Robert Redfield]

It's really on that vaccine advisory group that you talked about that you went to, which I have CDC people on. Yeah. But that's really the group that, and, you know, and they also have, as you know, the American Academy of Pediatrics on it. And if they were to change recommendations, that would come up to my desk to review.

[01:19:03]

Yeah.

[Del Bigtree]

Okay. So if something has to be readjusted, something added, then it gets kicked to you.

[Robert Redfield]

It would get kicked up for review. But in general, you know, that vaccine committee is a pretty powerful committee when it comes to vaccine policy in the United States.

[Del Bigtree]

Hepatitis B Vaccine Safety Review

I want to get, I'm going to throw something at you here. I've just pulled up on my computer. This is the Recombivax HPV vaccine.

[Robert Redfield]

Which vaccine?

[Del Bigtree]

The hepatitis B vaccine, which you have some understanding of hepatitis B. You said you worked on that. This is given to day one old babies. And I just want you to read out loud, just this is the FDA's website, 6.1 clinical trial experience.

[Robert Redfield]

Because clinical trials are conducted under a variety of varying conditions, adverse rates observed in the clinical trials of vaccine cannot be directly compared to rates in clinical trials of another vaccine and may not reflect the rates observed in practice.

[01:20:08]

How far do you want me to go?

[Del Bigtree]

I want to just read into how they came to the safety on this product.

[Robert Redfield]

This is three clinical studies, 434 doses for Recombivax at five micrograms were administered to 147 healthy infants and children up to the age of 10. They were monitored for five days after each dose. This is what we talked about. How many people, how long. Okay. And adverse reactions were reported at 0.2% and 10.4 of injections respectively. So systemics was 0.2 and the injection site was...

[Del Bigtree]

That's enough. I mean, I just really want to get to no placebo group. There's no placebo group. 147 children and a five-day safety review. There's two products like this. The other hepatitis B, I could show you, has a four-day safety review period.

[01:21:03]

It's a product given to day one old babies. Did they establish safety? Is there any way on earth to establish safety of a product in a five-day safety review with no placebo?

[Robert Redfield]

Yeah. I wouldn't come to that conclusion. All right. I suspect what they've done by the committee, is that the FDA's?

[Del Bigtree]

That's the FDA.

[Robert Redfield]

This is the insert that comes with the vaccine.

[Del Bigtree]

This is what they're bragging. This is how we decided it was safe.

[Robert Redfield]

The FDA probably extrapolated, whether that's appropriate or not, we can argue, that data that they had from adults and adolescents. Okay. I'm not a big advocate that the hepatitis V vaccine is a vaccine that really needs to be prioritized for newborns. I'd rather see that vaccine as a vaccine along with the human papillomavirus vaccine that we consider for 10, 11, 12, 15-year-olds. But no, I would not say that establishes it.

[01:22:01]

It basically just builds on the fact that they had this adult data. I'm actually relatively surprised that then they would change the indication. I don't know what the indication was before, but say the indication was the vaccine was approved for people over the age of two or over the age of five. I'm surprised that based on that limited data, they now said it's approved for people. What did you say? How many days old? One. Yeah. I'm surprised.

[Del Bigtree]

There's like in California...

[Robert Redfield]

The other side of...

[Del Bigtree]

I've gotten calls, just so you know, from people that have watched our work. I get called from the hospitals in California. I'm trying to leave the hospital having given birth, and they're being threatened that they're going to call Child Protective Services... If we don't let them have the vaccine. ...if they don't give this vaccine to their babies.

[Robert Redfield]

Yeah. I don't agree with that. So then... See, I don't agree with any of the heavy-handed... Approach to vaccines. Right. And all I think they do is accentuate hesitancy and lack of public trust.

[01:23:06]

I'm a public health person, and I have a lot of patients I've talked about vaccines. And I don't badger them when they say no. I make the argument why I think it's to their advantage. And when they say no, so be it. When they come back, I have the discussion again, so be it. I've argued that doctors need to spend more time educating people about why they think that vaccines of benefit to them. And not badgering people, threatening people. What happened with COVID was so wrong. So I would not... If you had asked me to weigh in on whether one-year-olds should get the hepatitis B vaccine, I'm not a big advocate of that. Now, if we were in Southeast Asia, and the mother that just gave birth to that baby had E antigen positivity, and that baby was high-risk for hepatitis B infection, I may say, hey, let's get that kid vaccinated, okay?

[01:24:03]

Because there's good data that they'll be less likely to become a chronic carrier. But in America, and the mother's not hepatitis B positive... I mean, we're testing her. We already know.

[Del Bigtree]

And the only risk would be if the mom's positive. I don't see it. I don't see it. Right. So now, I want to look at Robert Kennedy's job because he's about to jump into a space you were in. I could show you every single childhood vaccine, and they're within the ballpark of this level of safety testing. There's no placebo to be found in any of them. There's one tiny placebo group in the HPV Gardasil trials, and then that gets rolled in in a very suspicious way where it sort of hides the results. So I don't think you can compare that. So you have a whole program that has been developed that never, as far as I'm concerned, established safety. And I think you've been pretty clear it'd be hard to establish a safety baseline without a placebo trial.

[01:25:03]

And so we find ourselves in this position where vaccines like this are being given every single day to every single child. They can't go to school in most of the country. What do you do? What would you do?

Re-evaluating Hepatitis B Vaccine

I mean, forget about what Robert Kennedy would do right now. If you went back and re-evaluated this vaccine right now, and you were saved back as head of the CDC, what do you think is the appropriate thing to do with this vaccine right now, day one, back in the Trump administration?

[Robert Redfield]

You mean for Hepatitis B? Hepatitis B, this one right here.

[Del Bigtree]

What would you do?

[Robert Redfield]

For me, I think that part of the reason for vaccination is that you are preventing a process that's a significant risk. I don't think a one-year-old's at a high risk in the United States today for Hepatitis B.

[Del Bigtree]

I do think just for everyone that's watching, maybe they're unaware, it's essentially a sexually transmitted disease from promiscuous sex or intravenous drug users.

[01:26:03]

When you were developing it and working on it, it was designed for intravenous drug users and people that have...

[Robert Redfield]

Initially, it wasn't appreciated, but clearly a major transmission most likely for most people is sex. I did a study that a friend of mine was developing a gonorrhea vaccine, and they vaccinated thousands of people for gonorrhea in Korea. As part of that vaccine trial, I asked them if they could put a questionnaire change on the questionnaire was, have you ever had Hepatitis? Then I asked them, how long have you been in Korea? Then I asked for some blood because they were already doing the trial. What I showed is when the United States military soldiers got to Korea, that about 3% of them had evidence of having Hepatitis B at some point in time.

[01:27:02]

We can measure that by measuring an antibody to what we call antibody decor, and your antibody decor is positive if you have had Hepatitis in the past. It also could be positive if you're a chronic carrier. It's a great screen for me to know who's had Hepatitis. It was about 3%. Then my colleague doing the study was also bringing these people in and testing them if they had an STD and if they got gonorrhea. I had patients in that group that had been in Korea for, say, three months and got gonorrhea. That means they were obviously sexually active in Korea, or they had been in Korea for 12 months when they got gonorrhea. The antibody positivity for people when they were, say, 12 months and got gonorrhea was over 20%. Then I showed by different races, whites and blacks, and how long they were in.

[01:28:03]

It went from 3% up to 20-something percent over the course of a one-year assignment in Korea. That meant there was a lot of soldiers getting Hepatitis. I also showed in the 1-21st, which is the hospital. Our hospital, I showed how many people got there. They wouldn't really diagnose Hepatitis in people that weren't jaundiced, which is really probably less than 10%. But I showed how many cases we had. Then I went into the hostesses, and we evaluated a group of hostesses. We showed that about 10% to 12% had what we call E antigen positive Hepatitis, meaning they're infectious, very infectious. I was able to take that argument eventually to the Armed Forces Epidemiology Board, and argue that we should vaccinate our soldiers going to Korea. Because I was taking care at the time running a Hepatitis clinic at Walter Reed, and I was taking care of a lot of these families of soldiers that came back from Korea only to infect their wives.

[01:29:02]

In those days, we didn't have any treatment, and it was a problem. Or you came back and you were a chronic carrier, and I had to tell you to give up intimate relationships with your spouse, because otherwise you could infect her. Hepatitis B does have about a 1% mortality, so we did that. The Armed Forces Epidemiology Board denied my recommendation to vaccinate all soldiers going to Korea, because they thought it was too expensive. It was about $100 a shot. These are people that we spend thousands of dollars training. I didn't give up. I went back and I designed a clinical trial to show that I could maybe give a tenth of the dose, but I could give it intradermally, because friends of mine back in the 50s had shown that you could more efficiently present antigen to the human body intradermally for high-cost antigens. But in those days, they were all low-cost antigens. So I went back and did an intradermal study and showed that the volunteers that we did intradermally got just as good a response as those that we did with a full dose intramuscularly.

[01:30:11]

And then I took back to the Armed Forces Epidemiology Board and presented that data. And they said, well, now you've reduced the cost from 4millionto400,000. We think all soldiers should be vaccinated. So it's actually one of the most important things I think I did in the Army. I got all soldiers, not just going to Korea now, but going to Southeast Asia, and then all soldiers eventually, because soldiers have had sexual relationships with individuals that had high risk of hepatitis B infection. But I think it's a sexually transmitted disease. And when I went up against it at that time, people argued with me when I did the Korea study that our soldiers only got infected if they used IV drugs. I said, no, no, no, no. Our soldiers are getting infected from sex.

[01:31:00]

But nobody wanted to deal with it back then. So I proved it was sex. And then I went to the next step to try to get a solution. And then I had the next step to finally get approval on a solution. So for me, hepatitis B is one of those vaccines that is really kind of an adolescent vaccine.

Hepatitis B as an Adolescent Vaccine

Human papillomavirus, adolescent vaccine. I don't agree with the argument that we have to give every vaccine to children in the first year of life because they're captured. Right.

[Del Bigtree]

Which is, I mean, most people don't realize that that's just why they're doing it, right?

[Robert Redfield]

We've already got them, they're coming in. It's part of that mandatory brainset. No, no. Let me teach the adolescent and the parents the advantage of getting these kids vaccinated. Right.

[Del Bigtree]

Well, let's talk about that further because I want to challenge you there just based on what we just saw. Okay. I agree with you. Shouldn't, you know, we should be, if it's a great product, you should be able to sell it. But even as a doctor, you're going to teach them what?

[01:32:00]

That the vaccine has a benefit. But as a doctor, is there any way for you to know what its side effects and negative is based on this trial?

[Robert Redfield]

Not on that. So now we would have to have adequate safety. See, for me, I might argue, you may push back at me, so be it. I might argue that if I'm recommending to vaccinate 12 year olds, that's closer to using the data I have on 18 year olds. Yes.

[Del Bigtree]

But I would just say, I think we have to see the data. What were the side effects? Have we ever done a placebo trial that tracked, like we do every other drug, for at least, I mean, really, don't we need to be tracking these? I mean, I think there's an argument to be made that vaccines, the most likely side effects are going to be of your immune system, right? Some autoimmune conditions, things like that. I mean.

[Robert Redfield]

Yeah. And you mentioned some, you could, you know, or change your reproductive pathways.

[Del Bigtree]

Sure. You know, I can come up with. But those are things that don't.

[01:33:00]

[Robert Redfield]

So you ought to see those data.

[Del Bigtree]

Yeah. I don't disagree with you. So if we're not doing at least six months, and I would prefer two years because, I mean, most autoimmune conditions to rear their head would take about that long.

[Robert Redfield]

I would argue the original hepatitis B studies that were done around 1980, Don Francis, I think was the PI. I think those studies were all placebo controlled. I'll look into that. I'm only, I mean, I've only been focused on the childhood. Yeah. No, I'm talking about the original adult studies were pretty much placebo controlled. It's interesting because I think they were misinterpreted for efficacy. And I used to argue with Don about this because they argued that they had efficacy. And yet, when I looked at the data longer term, I saw that longer term the patients, the hepatitis B vaccine ultimately didn't prevent hepatitis B, but the people who got hepatitis B were less likely to be chronic carriers. Okay.

[01:34:00]

So it goes back to that same theory of modifying disease as opposed to preventing infection. So if you go back and look at that, it was published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, probably in 1982-ish. And again, the FDA should have records. I would be surprised if these adult vaccines were approved without a placebo group. I did vaccine studies, and I always had a placebo group when I did vaccine studies. Well, then you're one of the good guys. But I only had to do that because I couldn't tell what the real reactogenicity of the vaccine was.

[Del Bigtree]

I mean, look, I don't understand how any of these that we're looking at are, they can say they're safe. So, I mean, so now RFK is going to have to go in and figure out how to use post-marketing because you have an ethical problem. Do you not? You can't just go and say, hey, we're starting a new placebo trial because they'll argue ethically you can't do that because you can't deny someone access to a product that everyone's using that we believe works, protects you from these diseases.

[01:35:03]

You know, we have an ethical...

[Robert Redfield]

You definitely could do a vaccine trial where it's a volunteer group of individuals, and you probably would find today that 10 to 15% of individuals will elect not to be vaccinated. So you just find a group that say, I'll be in the trial, I'll match up with your group, and not be vaccinated. You could possibly do that, is all I'm saying, that there's a number of people that... Or, you know, you could do a crossover design, which I used to do, where you have a group of people that randomize the placebo, but they know that at six months or 12 months, they're going to cross over and get the vaccine. Yeah. You see what I'm saying?

[Del Bigtree]

Well, look, they did that. I mean, that's part of the problem, I think, with the EUA and the COVID vaccine. As soon as they delivered the EUA... Yeah, but they didn't keep a placebo. Right. Well, predictably, the pharmaceutical industry made it with... I mean, to me, as far as I'm concerned, you want that. It's like anything else. I mean, how long do you want to be analyzed in the work that you're doing?

[01:36:00]

Nobody wants the boss watching everything you're doing. So essentially, as soon as you had an emergency neutralization, they said, let's vaccinate everybody.

[Robert Redfield]

What Kennedy is going to have to do, in my view, is put together an advisory group to help weigh in on this. And some of that group could, in fact, be members already of the FDA. Marty's a good guy. And he's open-minded. And then what kind of advisory group we need to put together to really first do a rigorous wash on what we do know. And the FDA may have a lot of data. I told you on this talk today, it's not published data. It's just stuff I did in my life. You know what I mean? There may be a lot of data that the FDA has that is in their files that can look. And a lot of the data they have is also confidential data that they have with the industry that did it.

[01:37:01]

It's not public data. But really, you can make it public and say, listen, we're doing a deep scrub on this. And at least we want an honest summary for the American public of what we really do know and what we really do not know. And again, I'm going to come down pretty hard if anybody asks me. I'm not in favor of mandating these vaccines. I'm in favor of sitting down and discussing the benefit. But again, it would be of benefit in my ability to do that if I had objective data that really could relook at everything we do know about this.

[Del Bigtree]

Vaccine Safety Data Link Study

Would there be benefit? One of the things that we've looked into, the Vaccine Safety Data Link, this is this database that's like I think over 10 million people. Their names are scrubbed. Institute of Medicine years ago looked at it, said you actually have enough unvaccinated individuals to do a comparative study between the two. Would there be benefit to doing that study, compare the vaccinated to the completely unvaccinated?

[01:38:03]

[Robert Redfield]

I don't see a reason why we wouldn't. I mean, any type of knowledge would be of some value. I mean, if you saw no difference, it doesn't mean there isn't, but it helps you. If you saw certain things trigger, then it could trigger a more targeted evaluation to see if that thing's real or not.

[Del Bigtree]

So I was with Bobby when Donald Trump sent him to NIH. You're aware of this meeting that happened at the NIH. So right when Trump got into office originally, he brought Robert Kennedy Jr. in, offered him to be sort of a vaccine safety commission. That never came about, but he did set up a meeting at NIH, and I worked on the team to put together all of our concerns around the vaccine issue. We went to the NIH, and Bobby delivered all of it, several-hour meeting. Francis Collins sitting right across from Bobby. Tony Fauci is the first time I ever met that guy right across from me.

[01:39:00]

About 10 luminaries on the other side of the table. We asked two major issues. Are there any placebo trials? Because we can't find any on the childhood vaccines. All of your inserts are saying you're not doing them. They eventually conceded that they're not doing that, and I think it was Tony Fauci intimated it would be unethical to do a placebo trial, which was the first time I'd ever heard that term. I hear it a lot now. Then we said, well, why don't you do a comparative study of the vaccinated versus unvaccinated? And they essentially said in that meeting, we can't figure out a way to do that trial. That was the first statement that I think Francis Collins made. We can't figure out how to compare the vaccine to the unvaccinated. We brought up that the CDC had been funded after the Institute of Medicine said you could do that trial. And then since then, there was an email chain. They eventually said, we're not going to do that. We're not going to compare these two groups. I brought it up with Paul Offit before several, and what they'll say is that there's confounding issues.

[01:40:06]

We can't figure out how. What they're saying is we cannot figure out how to handle those confounding issues that would exist.

[Robert Redfield]

To me, I don't agree with any of that. I would argue, I guess it sounds like they're concerned that you might see a difference and that then they have to deal with it. Even if that difference isn't real, it may be confounded. But for me, show me the data. And if there is a difference, then I have to evaluate, well, what are the possibilities of why there is a difference? And I can look at the compounding variables and I can say, hey, when I looked at everything and I can't find that these groups are different in anything other than that they're different here. And then you form hypotheses around whatever that difference is and try to address it. So I don't think, I think, first, I think NIH is the wrong group.

[01:41:00]

Okay. Just in general, now may be okay with Jay coming in and he may be able to look at it. I think the FDA would probably be a better group. Even CDC, I don't really know. I mean, maybe a panel of FDA, CDC, that would be tasked to do this with a group of outside experts that we can identify would at least be objective. I mean, I think Paul has a very strong view about vaccines, as you know. My own sense, he still could be objective. I mean, he learned the hard way that some vaccines cause problems with the rotavirus vaccine that you move forward with kids. So, but you could, you know, and really go through what the state of the data is.

[01:42:01]

I think if you did that comparison, it's data. No one should be afraid of the data.

[Del Bigtree]

Vaccinated vs. Unvaccinated Studies

Let me ask you this question because I'm, again, I'm not a scientist and I don't like making assumptions and I try to stick with the facts, but I want to make an assumption here. Don't you think we can assume that somebody, CDC, FDA, NIH, over the last whatever decades of people saying that the vaccinated are, you know, are poisoned, the unvaccinated are healthy, whatever the argument is being made by the unvaccinated groups, right? The anti-vaxxers, whatever you want to call it. Can't we assume somebody went and just said, let me just compare these two groups inside of that database?

[Robert Redfield]

I think it's highly likely. And so that's true. And it's, as I said to you, they may not want to see the answer out there. Okay. Well, I think it's highly likely. I don't know. It's factual.

[Del Bigtree]

But if the knee-jerk reaction is, and they say it so quickly, well, there's confounding issues. That says to me, you know, there are. That says to me, you've looked at these two groups.

[01:43:00]

[Robert Redfield]

I would assume somebody's looked. I would test the FDA. To me, that's the group. Marty's going to be great. And, you know, and Weldon and Jay can cooperate with them. But I think getting the FDA to be the one that really, really do this. Yeah. All right. Because at the end of the day, it's the FDA. If there is a reason to put in any qualifiers, it's their regulatory responsibility. It's not NIH's, it's not CDC's. So, and the whole issue is to look at, you know, sort of cost benefit. I mean, so maybe they do find there's some issues, but they also believe there's benefit. Make that argument to the American public.

[Del Bigtree]

If I just compare the vaccinated to the unvaccinated and then the unvaccinated have lived longer, let's say, I mean, whatever. So then you say, well, I mean, look, I could make this argument too.

[01:44:01]

I mean, you know, unvaccinated parents tend to be like these granola hippie types. They're probably not smoking cigarettes in the house around the kids. They're most likely drinking bottled water, not tap water. There's a lot of things that you could argue these families are doing differently. But we know that if you just did a comparative study and they were the same or the vaccinated were living longer and healthier, I would think that would be the easiest headline that every one of the regulatory agencies would love to post immediately. And since I haven't seen that, I'm going to have to assume that every time they're looking at this, the unvaccinated are coming out pretty good in that study.

Re-evaluating Vaccine Safety

That's just, that's my assumption. Just to sort of finish it up around Bobby Kennedy. There seems to be real alarm that he's going to do all of this. He's going to do comparative studies inside the databases. He's going to reanalyze vaccines, you know, the whole polio argument, even though we have multiple polio vaccines. And one of them is one that my nonprofit looked at and he's getting tied to that, which is ridiculous.

[01:45:01]

But is there any, is there anything, is there any reason it would be dangerous to reevaluate any product?

[Robert Redfield]

No. Okay. I don't see the reason one should be. This is the problem. There are people who want to take that position as Kennedy's already felt. That's why I've always argued that Bobby Kennedy's not anti-vaccine. He's for transparency in vaccines. He wants to see the safety data. He wants to see the efficacy data. He wants to acknowledge where there is no data, that there is no data. Yeah. Okay. Unfortunately, you have a lot of people who are just comfortable experts with giving opinions.

COVID-19 Origin Theories

You know, I know this the hard way, because, you know, I've been a big advocate that the COVID virus came from the Wuhan laboratory.

[01:46:00]

There is no data that this virus came from spillover. Zero, zippo, zero. And yet, if you talk to NIH, you talk to Fauci, you talk to all the people, you talk to scientists, it came from spill, newspaper spillover. No, there's opinions that it came from spillover, but there actually is real data that it came from the laboratory. When was that your first position? Oh, in January of 2020.

[Del Bigtree]

So one month into this thing.

[Robert Redfield]

Soon as I looked into it. Yeah.

[Del Bigtree]

What was it you saw that made you just think lab origin, other than the fact that it breaks out five feet away from the lab?

[Robert Redfield]

Initially, the thing that made me think about it seriously was I, you know, like anything, I came at the very beginning, and I know George Gao well, who was my CDC counterpart in China, was there was two hypotheses, and that's how I approached it. Spillover, because that's what SARS and MERS did, and the laboratory.

[01:47:00]

And the laboratory, because that laboratory had published a paper in 2014, 15, that they actually were trying to teach this virus how to infect humans through humanized mouse. So it wasn't, I was making it up. They actually published the paper. Right. All right. And they thanked NIH for the money. And so I knew they were doing experiments to try to make it infect humans. And I knew spillover is what MERS and SARS did. However, I'm a clinical virologist. All right. I always remind people that Tony was an immunologist. I went to Tony and said, we need to go after these two hypotheses. Same thing we just talked about with vaccines. And I said, I want an aggressive, open, transparent investigation into both hypotheses. Yeah. And I want NIH to launch it. You and Collins launch it. Okay. We'll help support it. Literally a couple of days after that discussions is when he set up those phone calls with the scientists February 1st, and I was not included in those calls. Now he argues he didn't exclude me. My point is he didn't include me.

[Del Bigtree]

All right.

[Robert Redfield]

Which is, I mean, I think that's odd.

[01:48:00]

[Del Bigtree]

Centers for disease control and prevention, a disease running around the planet. Isn't that literally what the CDC is designed for?

[Robert Redfield]

And particularly when he knew my position from the White House task force, which I had expressed a week earlier, that I was of the point of view, to answer your question, that the most likely ideology of this virus was the laboratory. And so why? As a clinical virologist, when a zoonotic virus comes in to man, like SARS did in 2003, or MERS in 2012, from a bat to a civet cat, or from a bat to a camel, it needs to learn how to infect humans. So when you look at SARS, even today, which is now over 20 years later, it's infected less than 10,000 humans. It hasn't learned how to efficiently infect humans.

[01:49:00]

All right. When MERS came in 2012, 13, from a bat to a camel, today, it still hasn't learned how to infect humans, less than 10,000 humans. It's sort of like what we're seeing with bird flu right now. It doesn't know how to go human to human. This virus immediately knew how to go human to human.

[Del Bigtree]

And to be clear, because this is something that we do see on occasion, it goes animal to human for a moment, but then there's that next step where the human then can give it to another human being. That's where it takes a long time for evolution to get to that point.

[Robert Redfield]

Long, long time. And we know, for example, with COVID, we knew exactly what had to happen. We knew exactly what amino acids had to change. Because a group in Europe, in Netherlands in 2012, actually figured it out and published it. I argued it shouldn't be published. Fauci argued it should be published.

[01:50:01]

I argued it shouldn't be published because I thought some nutcase bioterrorist may take that information and create a problem for the whole world. It turns out that this virus immediately knew how to do that. So that's the first thing that bothered me. Just teleologically, it didn't make sense to me that we had now thousands of people infected immediately. Right? And we don't see that. The second thing that bothered me was, and some of it's been declassified now. This has been declassified. Hopefully soon with Trump, all of it will be declassified. But I was sort of the advisor to Pompeo. So as we got classified information in that had virology speak in it, he would ask me to come in and translate it for him. And so he asked me to translate one of the things that came in. And that was the first example, now declassified, that this virus had a fear in cleavage site.

[01:51:00]

Which I said, wow, that's interesting. I actually told Pompeo, that's a smoking gun. I said, that cleavage site doesn't belong there. A couple of things about that cleavage site, contrary to what Fauci and others have said about, well, we see it in other coronaviruses. We don't see it in this class of coronaviruses at all. Okay? So it's extremely unique. Second thing you need to know, it's 12 nucleotides. So that codes for four amino acids. If you look at the sequence of nucleotides that code for arginine, you can have different combinations of nucleic acids to code for arginine. And so you can have different three-letter combinations, right? The three-letter combination that's in this 12-nucleotide sequence was the three letters that humans prefer. Not the three letters that bats prefer. So why does this fear in cleavage site even there? And why does it have the amino acid sequence for arginine that humans prefer, not bats?

[01:52:03]

Then you ask the most critical question as a virologist, which I did. And this is where I get upset with Tony that he didn't follow through on this with me. Now I take the current COVID-19 and I ask the question, can it infect human cells? Very well. Boom. Can it infect bats? It hardly infects bats. So how does this virus that somehow came from bats lose its ability to even infect bats? But it's highly infectious. Now there's a couple other things. There's a good neurologist out at Livermore that's done a lot of this work. The interfering response element was knocked out, which means when you get this virus, you don't get sick. So be it. And there was three other mutations that when you get this virus, you don't develop an immunodominant response, which means you can even get infected over and over and over again. I happen to believe the Chinese were developing this virus as a vaccine vector, that what they wanted to use to vaccinate people, not against COVID, but against measles and mumps and everything.

[01:53:11]

So they wanted to be able to have it aerosolized, transmitted. They wanted to make sure you didn't get sick and they wanted to use it over and over again. But to me, and I basically, all of that was common knowledge in January, I figured out by looking at stuff. And so I argued as a virologist, I think the most likely, but at that time I kept an open mind. The explanation was lab, but maybe spillover, although it's highly irregular. 80,000 animals later, we don't find a reservoir. Five years later, they still haven't figured out what the... So no, to me, it definitely, and you'll see this, I'm sure.

Intelligence Community and COVID Origin

John Radcliffe, hopefully, has taken over the CIA. Hopefully, we'll get all of the intelligence out. You'll see the intelligence agencies will reevaluate their analysis.

[01:54:00]

And I think there'll be unanimity with the FBI.

[Del Bigtree]

But it's going to bring up a lot of problems. It's going to be a lot of problems that was handled, especially by Anthony Fauci, because one has to ask, why so committed to proving that it's still over? Do you have a reason?

[Robert Redfield]

Oh, yeah. There's no doubt about it. I don't think there's any doubt about why he did it. And I think the reason he did it was, it was he's of the belief, he's the poster child for gain of function research. I'm the poster child for a moratorium on gain of function research. Tony wanted to preserve gain of function research at all costs, Collins, all costs, and the scientists around them at all costs, because they don't want the federal government regulating science. That's where they dug their heels in. That's why they excluded someone like myself. I've written the op-eds in the Wall Street Journal on this. I'm going to do some more. I really think I'm working on one with the Heritage Foundation.

[01:55:00]

Now, I really believe we need a moratorium on gain of function research. And hopefully, Rand Paul, now that he'll take over as chairman and Homeland Security, will go ahead and put a moratorium on it.

Gain of Function Research Concerns

And hopefully, Jay Bhattacharya, when he takes over NIH, will just say, we're going to reevaluate any grant that has risk of this, and we're going to put a pause on them. All right? I'm worried, because bird flu is going to be catastrophic. It could come from spillover. We're already in over 28 mammal species in the United States where the bird flu has gotten into since 2019. So it's constantly learning. Climbing, moving. And it's changing in each of those animals. But it hasn't learned how to go human to human, even in the human that was infected in Louisiana. We know that human, in the course of that infection, the virus changed within that human. And the virus changed within that human in a way that allows it to infect the human tissue better.

[01:56:04]

All right? Still hasn't gone human to human, but it's learning. I don't like the fact that it went into pigs. A lot of the flu rearrangement happens in pigs. I do know that there's more and more agricultural workers being infected than meets the eye, and hopefully there'll be better surveillance to get a handle on that. But my real concern is not spillover, although I think it's getting more and more possible. My real concern is gain-of-function research. We have laboratories that are actually trying to teach this virus how to infect human tissue. And that is not smart.

[Del Bigtree]

Bird Flu and Pandemic Potential

There's some argument that a highly, like with a high mortality rate, like we hear with it could be, some people say 30%. 30 to 50%? 30 to 50%. But doesn't, I mean, doesn't that make it harder for it to spread? I mean, just if we really look at it, I mean, there's this fear, and I think people think 30, 50%, I mean, that's going to wipe out, you know, half the planet, if you will.

[01:57:05]

But it actually, doesn't it, I mean, throughout time, doesn't it contain itself? Because if you're killing your host, you can't spread? I mean, I mean, that is kind of what we think happened with SARS a little bit, isn't it? That it was very infectious, but it kind of...

[Robert Redfield]

No, it just didn't know how to go human to human. That was it. It had a 9% mortality, 10% mortality. MERS had about a 35% mortality, still couldn't go human to human. The truth is we've had probably close to 1,000 cases of H5N1, say, since 2010 in Southeast Asia. And the overall mortality rates between 30 to 50%. It's a bad virus, okay? The virus in the United States so far hasn't been so bad. We've had 66 cases that I know of, and we've had one death, all right? That's still not good. That's 1.5% mortality, which is probably substantially more than, say, COVID, you know. But what happens is the virus will learn how to replicate better in man, which is what we saw in Louisiana patient.

[01:58:11]

The virus that went into him is different than the virus that they got after he was infected. That virus now was replicating better than him, the second virus, than the first virus, all right? But it wasn't transmitting any better, okay? And a lot of that has to do with the receptor dynamics that we talked about with the fear and cleavage site. But when you look at the cases, two things, the virus can evolve to learn how to infect better in man, and it may become less pathogenic. It may become more pathogenic. I can't tell you. My instincts are the bird flu virus in man, when it learns how to replicate and transmit well in man, will have greater than a 5% mortality, okay?

[01:59:08]

It may not have a 50% mortality. And the problem with the issue of what, but it might die out, these respiratory viruses are so infectious, so infectious, that they'll have plenty of time to probably, for every one patient it infects that dies, it will probably infect four to 10 people before it's out of circulation. So in other words, this will become an exponential pandemic.

[Del Bigtree]

Is there, one of my concerns, and you know, is that they're talking about, you know, starting to vaccinate, you know, with whatever vaccine they have, even though it's wrong, if it's not going to be dialed in.

[Robert Redfield]

They already did it. They bought all of the, we have the H5N1 vaccine that we developed back in 2005. It doesn't work.

[Del Bigtree]

And with leaky vaccines, leaky meaning they don't work, it's not going to stop transmission or, you know, is there a danger that if you start vaccinating all of the cattle workers and all the people that are around these animals, you could give the virus a head start if it does make that jump, right?

[02:00:16]

I mean, if you had, if they're getting sick, we're going to go, oh my God, they're getting sick in this area. We move in, we quarantine them.

[Robert Redfield]

I think you have to see some evidence of efficacy. Now, what we're doing, what we're doing, because again, I'm working on antivirals in this space. Right. And the way we're approaching it is that we're trying to show, since you're not going to show it works in humans, because you don't have human infections, but the FDA has a pathway, which is the two animal model rule. So I have to show that it works in two independent animal models. I'm actually doing three. I did mice. It works unbelievably. We're doing ferrets now, will be done in January. And then we're doing non-human primates in February. So this virus that we're working with is a virus that infected a dairy cow and then infected a dairy cow worker.

[02:01:06]

And then CDC isolated the virus from that dairy farm worker. And then we are using that virus as a challenge virus to these animals. Normally what we have to do in the flu space is we have to adapt the virus to be able to efficiently affect these animals so we can use it as a model. This virus immediately, we put into our humanized mice model immediately and didn't have to adapt it at all. Immediately, the control animals, all of them were dead in six days. The same virus now in primates, all of them are dead in five days. This is a very, very pathogenic virus for mammals. All right. Now, I don't know what it will do if I put it into humans, not planning to do that, but I am trying to see if I have a drug. So in the animal model we did with the mice, humanized mice, all of the mice that we treated with our drug survived.

[02:02:03]

And we'll see if that's true in ferrets. And then we'll see if that's true in monkeys. We'll just have to see. But this is, I think the bird flu is a real threat. I'm very worried about the US response because they're knee jerking. He gave $170 million to Moderna to make an mRNA vaccine. I heard that he's just got a bunch more money Biden's pouring out to make a vaccine by EUA vaccine right away. I think that's not what we need to be doing. I do do the argument as a virologist, which I do think warp speed is something that Trump can be proud of. One of the most successful vaccine development programs in the history of the nation, and yet still 1.2 million Americans died. So I sure don't want that to be my goal line here as we go into the flu.

[Del Bigtree]

Early COVID Treatments

Well, I mean, is any of that, I mean, I don't know where you weigh on this. I haven't seen you speak to it, but you did have drugs like hydroxychloroquine, like ivermectin that have had, I mean, hydroxychloroquine was being used.

[02:03:06]

I mean, Tony Fauci, I think he's got his name on a study that showed that it had some success in dealing with SARS. You had Didier Raoult in France having very successful trials. You were in there. What was the passion to come? I mean, the second Donald Trump said, hey, I heard about hydroxychloroquine, it's like Tony Fauci tackles him, grabs the microphone and starts screaming, we know nothing about it. It was a little suspicious.

[Robert Redfield]

What I did, first thing I'll say, for the record, I'm a strong advocate that we should not interfere with doctors and patients taking drugs off label, period. And I'm right now treating many patients with long COVID off label. I formed consent of the patient, let them know what I know. When hydroxychloroquine came up and I heard that discussion, Fauci and Trump, the first thing I did was I tasked the MMWR, which CDC puts out every week, I tasked them to put an article out on everything we know about hydroxychloroquine, everything we know about it.

[02:04:10]

How's it been used, what dose, what side effects, et cetera. The CDC people came after me like you wouldn't believe.

[Del Bigtree]

Your own CDC, you're the head of the CDC.

[Robert Redfield]

Yeah, they came after me like you wouldn't believe, that I had no right to do that. And I said, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. If doctors are using this drug, I want them to know what we know. No, you're advocating the drug. No, I'm not advocating the drug.

[Del Bigtree]

I'm not- Well, first of all, you don't even know if it's all negative.

[Robert Redfield]

I'm not non-advocating the drug. I want doctors to have everything they need. And so I published it. I got pummeled by my people. I mean, pummeled. But I published it. I said, I'm the editor, we're publishing it. And as soon as it goes matter of record, you can go out.

[02:05:01]

I published it. I didn't do it for ivermectin because we knew a lot about ivermectin, and most doctors knew about ivermectin. The fact that doctors lost their license because they prescribed that stuff is inconscionable to me. Both of those drugs should have been able to be used. And if doctors and patients felt they should use... And there's many patients, as you know, as we speak today, that are on ivermectin or even hydroxychloroquine with long COVID. That was a big... The negative response to discussion and debate, which is what we talked about earlier, that Fauci and others exhibited is, to me, unacceptable. That's not what science is about. Science is about open discussion and debate. But the emotionalism that they had against us, even me, that I wasn't prescribing it at the time, but I was just trying to give you information. So if you were, you knew what we knew. So I agree with you.

[02:06:00]

It's highly suspect, highly problematic. It has to do with, unfortunately, what happens when certain people have jobs for 20, 30, 40 years. They don't realize, I know that I can be wrong, right? I know that. I always tell people that the people I respect the most are the people that teach me through data that I was wrong because they taught me something. If you teach me through data that I'm right, I'm not as excited about it because I already knew that. But if you say, I think this is, here's the data, and this is what I think, and then you actually disagree with me, and then you show me data, and I look at the data and I say, wow, I was wrong. Thank you. I learned something from you. That's not how this is done. These guys don't believe. They think they're not open-minded that they could be wrong.

[02:07:00]

[Del Bigtree]

Fauci's Influence and Science Denial

But how do you explain? You have what we're being told is this pandemic sweeping. It's killing people like crazy. They're getting into this saying, we're hoping the vaccine comes in time. Frankly, the first time in history that early diagnosis didn't seem to mean anything. It meant go home, wait until you're dying, and then come back. We watched the medical establishment, and I've been reporting on it for over a decade. Early treatment has always been, that is the advancement in modern medicine.

[Robert Redfield]

Diagnosis and early treatment.

[Del Bigtree]

So suddenly we're saying there's absolutely nothing we can do for you. Go home. If your lips turn blue, come back, and then we're going to stick you on a remdesivir, which has got its own issues in its own drug trials, and a ventilator, which proved to be perhaps the wrong move. How do you explain people taking a drug off the market that so many doctors around the world are saying, I'm having success with this.

[02:08:03]

I'm having success. Why would you go out of your way? It's not like you had, wait, this is better. Don't use that. Use this. You've got nothing. You've absolutely nothing in your hands. Why were they killing the only drugs that people were liking?

[Robert Redfield]

I don't know. Obviously there was an over-reliance, an over-promotion on the vaccine. No doubt about that. I mean, I know Tony would tell people that when 30% of the herd immunity, the thing was over. And then he said 50. And then he said 70. And I tell people, I said this publicly. So when he said 70, there was a good reporter, it might've been you, said, Dr. Fauci, a couple of months ago, you said 50%. What new data do you have that changed your mind that it has to be 70% now for herd immunity to stop the pandemic? And he said, I couldn't believe he said it. He said, well, I don't have any new data, but when I said 50%, I just think you weren't ready to hear 70%. And I said to Tony afterwards, I said, Tony, you just got to get on board.

[02:09:03]

We just got to tell the American people the truth. Just tell them the truth. And I told the president there is no herd immunity for this pathogen. Tony was telling him that we're going to have herd immunity. We're not going to have herd immunity. This is where Marty was wrong too. He was off on herd immunity, but we're all allowed to be wrong. You don't hear Marty preaching herd immunity now. So he made his own assessment. As a virologist, I knew that for this virus, herd immunity wasn't operational. Why? Because I already had patients by May that were having their second episode of COVID. So if natural infection wasn't preventing them from getting reinfected, then the vaccine wasn't going to do it. And so I knew that we weren't going to have herd immunity.

COVID Vaccine Mandates

So it's just going to be cycles of infection, susceptibles. You get infected, you're non-susceptible for a while, then you're susceptible again. And that's why we knew we're just going to have one wave after another.

[02:10:02]

[Del Bigtree]

So what was it like to sit, it wasn't on your watch, the president of the United States, Joe Biden gets up and says, you're not like essentially employees, companies that have over a hundred employees, health workers, we're going to take your job away if you don't get this vaccine. And is it fair to say that at that point, everyone that was in a position of power knew that this vaccine wasn't going to stop transmission?

[Robert Redfield]

Was that knowledge? Well, I would think so. I would think so. I mean, I can't say, but I would think so. There was absolutely no data. You were saying it. I said it. Deborah Birx says she was saying it.

[Del Bigtree]

Oh, she was saying it. She was saying it. I read Scott Atlas book. I mean, he describes, and I don't know that you're not all fans maybe of each other, but he did say Deborah Birx thought the vaccine was a joke from the very beginning.

[Robert Redfield]

So she, you know, she believes with me, she was my deputy for many years and I know Debbie quite well. Debbie agrees with me, if you talk to her, that the vaccine helped save lives of vulnerables, period.

[02:11:04]

It didn't interrupt transmission, period. And it really had no benefit to assume any risk for people that weren't vulnerable.

[Del Bigtree]

Right.

[Robert Redfield]

Okay. And the argument that Joe Biden said, which made me very mad, when he would say, this is a epidemic of the unvaccinated. See, I knew already in my job as Hogan's guy that by May, most of my patients that were getting COVID, I think I measured like 60, 70% of them were already vaccinated. Right. Right. So it wasn't an epidemic of unvaccinated. It was an epidemic of the not effectively vaccinated. And I hated the way the government tried to set it up and say, you know, when you first got the vaccine, the two shots, the way they classified you, which made me very upset because I thought it was not based on data. They said, you're fully vaccinated.

[02:12:00]

You're fully vaccinated now, Del. Well, wait a minute. If I'm fully vaccinated, oh, you mean I'm home free. This is done. I'm done. It's like, holy, I'm fully vaccinated. No, you weren't fully vaccinated. You were given a vaccine that would modify your risk of death and hospitalization for a period of time. And that period of time was not defined. But to me, it was clearly going to be less than a year because I was seeing too many people getting multiple infections. So I, you know, and in general, it's probably three months to six months is what you get perfection. For me and my wife, we're using six months. We just get revaccinated every six months. And that's what I do for my patients. I offer them to revaccinate every six months if they want.

[Del Bigtree]

Walensky's Statements on Vaccine Efficacy

Your predecessor, President Walensky comes in. She comes after you. She's out there on the news saying it's 95% effective. And they're telling the news, you got Rachel Maddow saying, if you get this vaccine, the virus stops with you.

[02:13:05]

Huge guilt trip on anyone that would think to not get it.

[Robert Redfield]

Don't take it home to grandma.

[Del Bigtree]

Was she just, was Walensky clueless?

[Robert Redfield]

She was definitely wrong, whether she was clueless or whether she was telling, speaking what she was told to say. And when I say told to say, you know, she did have a lot of admiration for Fauci, for sure. I liked her. I thought she was a good replacement for me because when I became the CDC director, I was a change in the mold. All the other directors largely came out of CDC. I was a real doctor practicing medicine. I took care of patients. I did clinical research. I had, you know, I did a lot of work in the AIDS epidemic, both basic science, as well as clinical science, as well as population science. So, and I was a head of ID. So, Lewinsky, I liked the fact she's coming in head of ID, Harvard. I mean, she knew how to do clinical research.

[02:14:01]

She was a good clinician. She did a lot of work in Africa, particularly more in population. So, I was just glad that they didn't go back to some computer epidemiologist. And, you know, I respected her. I think she probably, I don't think she had the security in her own mind to be countercultural. What do you mean by that? What do you mean? I mean, to say what, you know, let's just say, you know, to go against a narrative, say, that Fauci was putting out there. You know, Tony and I have never had problems disagreeing with each other.

[Del Bigtree]

I was, you know, I actually did a FOIA request. I said, early on, somewhere in there, I saw you make some statement on television. I said, I want to put in a FOIA request for all emails written in all caps between Tony Fauci and Robert Redfield. I had a sense that there was some...

[02:15:01]

[Robert Redfield]

Well, you won't get much because I don't write emails. We didn't find much.

[Del Bigtree]

You won't.

[Robert Redfield]

Or it would have been posted publicly, I guarantee you. I don't use email, okay? And I don't use social media. And when I became CDC director, my emails were, yes, give me a call. Let's meet for lunch. And so when I left and they asked for all my records, they couldn't believe it. The archives said, well, where's all your records? I mean, it was like, I think they had like five pages. Wow. You know, and like when they, when Burks left, she probably had, you know, 10 trunks. Yeah. You know, I don't, I never found emails useful. Fauci and I had our own disagreements over time.

Fauci and Redfield's Relationship

We had our own agreements. Did you guys go all, I mean, you were both on AIDS. We went back to 81 and we worked together. We published papers together. Yeah, okay. We did a lot together. And, you know, when my son almost died, he reached out to me and, you know, when he almost died, when he was very sick with West Nile, I reached out to him.

[02:16:02]

I mean, I'd say we're friends. We just don't, we just disagree on everything.

[Del Bigtree]

Yeah.

[Robert Redfield]

We disagree on a lot. Yeah. I think he did not serve the nation well. I think his issue on origin and on gain of function research is not good. I don't think he's been truthful. And I would like him just to kind of be a little humble and just tell the truth. I just said, you know, we should continue the dialogue because I think it's so important for people who have different points of view to dialogue rather than say, oh, I can't talk to you because I don't agree with you. Or I don't talk to you because I don't agree with you. This is what I was upset with some of the stuff in the early COVID times where there was clearly two different hypotheses, but the answer was not to discuss them. Right? You know, this is where Fauci and I had our disagreements. Let's talk about the origin.

[Del Bigtree]

You know, I mean, isn't that, I mean, to me, science died.

Censorship and Scientific Debate

Yeah, science died.

[02:17:00]

During COVID because at the heart of science is...

[Robert Redfield]

Is dialogue, disagreement, argument.

[Del Bigtree]

There's no such thing as settled science. You're supposed to be challenging the hypothesis. That's right. And yet everyone that did, every doctor got, was censored, shut down. We got Zuckerberg coming forward now saying, I was under massive pressure to block all speech.

[Robert Redfield]

I was censored. I have death threats. I could show you some of the letters from very prominent scientists because I suggested that we should moratorium and get a functional research or because I thought the lab... I had the Baltimore Sun, and I have a lot of grandkids who live in this area, published that I was Asian racist because I said the virus came from China after I did the Gupta interview on CNN. And, and I then had the house and the Senate, the state of Maryland issue a declaration that I should be censored, formally censored.

[02:18:12]

And they did that. I've asked them to rescind it. They haven't done that. I asked Hogan to get him to rescind it. He said, it's a bridge too far, but they did ask Hogan to fire me.

[Del Bigtree]

A bridge too far. Hold on. Stay right there. Because I mean, you're deeper in this. I mean, of all the people, I mean, I lost my YouTube channel, Facebook, all of that over these same conversations, but we now have the pandemic committee put out a 500 page document. I mean, we, FBI and that committee are saying most likely a lab, you know, Department of Energy makes perfect sense.

Accountability for COVID Response

Social distancing. No data. No data. Masks, troubled data, you know, poor data. Shouldn't have been forcing kids.

[02:19:00]

Vaccine, you know, maybe. Shouldn't have been mandated. Yeah. I mean, all of those things. Why is nobody, first of all, why is there no apology from everybody that brought authoritarian rule based on this?

[Robert Redfield]

That's what I thought. I mean, Kennedy owes, you know, they owe Jay about a charity apology. I personally think they owe me an apology. So I was saying about the Senate and the house, they passed the thing for me to be censored. They asked Hogan to fire me because remember, I was working for him as senior public health advisor. Hogan's married to a Korean woman. His three children are part Asian. And they, you know, and his grandchildren are part Asian. And so to Hogan's credit, he went up and said, listen, I know Redfield well. He's not an Asian racist. I mean, he's just telling you what he believes is the origin of this virus. And I'm not going to fire him anyhow, because when it comes down to it, he's working for free. He's the cheapest employee I got. But I did ask him if he could get the House and the Senate to flip it.

[02:20:03]

He said it's not going to happen, which they should do. They made a terrible error. And I have the new owner of the Baltimore Sun has offered to do something, but I don't really want it. Five years later, would I want the Baltimore Sun to do anything?

[Del Bigtree]

But I would say you should. I think I think we're going to be really there's a dearth right now of historical record, at least from the side that got censored the entire time. It proves to be the ones that were right. How powerful is Fauci?

Fauci's Power and Influence

I mean, because he's the one we all saw on television delivering this stuff. Is he working for someone else? We're not seeing.

[Robert Redfield]

I don't know the answer. I will tell you this disturbing. 2002, 2003, Dick Cheney decided that the biodefense program in the United States needed to move out of Fort Detrick in the Army and it need to be repositioned at NIH.

[02:21:01]

And they put Tony in charge of it. About I think all in all, it's been close to 40 billion dollars. So he's run our entire bioweapon biodefense program. And I don't know what connections he had with that, but I'm sure they aren't just with university scientists. Right. Well, I mean, he doles out a lot of money. He's been, you know, he don't a lot of money for science. But here's another group of money he's doling out. You know, I think they said it was like 38, 40 billion dollars in biodefense. I do think it's one of the reasons the intelligence agencies, the city and the Energy Department, the FBI came to the right conclusion from my perspective. And and the reason they did is they use their own scientists. The CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency, they used, you know, Fauci and Christian Anderson and others. They didn't use their own scientists. John Radcliffe and I, I respect John enormously.

[02:22:00]

And we did the commission with Heritage Foundation on sort of accountability for China, not for the doing the research, because that research was funded by the United States, but at least for the fact that they didn't follow the international health regulations, which we could have all had a better response if they had come open with the data when they first saw this new pandemic starting probably in August, September of 2019. And as a consequence, you know, there's a price the world paid by not having their openness, the price I paid by not letting me in the first week when I wanted to get in to find out, is it human to human? Is it asymptomatic? It took me at least another three weeks to figure that out. And if I'd known from the beginning, I would have had a whole different program for the United States's response. It wouldn't have been looking for symptomatic cases. It would have been we have to have a accelerated warp speed testing program because we need to test, test and isolate, you know, test, test, test. Instead, we were still looking for we were still looking for symptomatic cases.

[02:23:00]

So the first 14 cases we had up to the second week of February, you know, I had about 800 contacts that we evaluated. Only two of those contacts ended up being positive for COVID. So I concluded, along with CDC, that this isn't that infectious, despite what we're seeing in China. But how did we evaluate those people? We evaluated them by asking them if they were sick. If they weren't sick, we didn't test them. We only tested the sick people.

[Del Bigtree]

Asymptomatic COVID Spread

So you got a real you didn't get a jump on the asymptomatic.

[Robert Redfield]

We didn't get jump at all. I didn't get that until the Diamond Princess happened in Japan and Japan offered to let us come in and help. And I got a CDC team in there and I found out that half the people infected on the boat had no symptoms. So then I knew we were in trouble.

[Del Bigtree]

Isn't it dangerous to have public officials like Fauci? I mean, it seems like there was a real interference in good science. I mean, and you said you weren't invited to that meeting, but even Christian Anderson was saying, it looks lab origin to me.

[02:24:01]

[Robert Redfield]

I mean, the people that ended up writing the big, you know, yeah, they also a number of said it, but they all changed their mind pretty quickly, pretty quickly in some meeting, which I wouldn't have changed my mind. You know, right. My data was based on hard concrete virology. Right. And I wasn't funded by Fauci.

[Del Bigtree]

But even when we sent someone then to look at the lab, we send EcoHealth Alliance, basically. So we send the people that would be funding the studies in there almost to clean up, to me, their own mess.

[Robert Redfield]

And that's WHO. So WHO made that decision. It's a terrible conflict. You know, at least my friend Jeff Sass, finally, he was doing it for Lancet, finally stepped down when he found out that he couldn't believe that they had, once he found out what EcoHealth Alliance's role was, he couldn't believe that they assigned him to be the head of the virology. He said, wait a minute, what are you talking about? You can't do that. Right. So now it was said, Tony could have made a huge difference in an aggressive, honest, scientific investigation.

[02:25:00]

And I actually said publicly on many occasions that the approach that he and Collins took was antithetical to science. Because like you said, science fosters debate. One of the beautiful things about science, it's self-purifying. It's not a sin to be wrong in science. You come up with a hypothesis. Right. You promote it. Someone provides data that you're not correct, you change your mind. Right. Right. That's called science. They didn't allow that. And they targeted people. They obviously targeted me. They targeted Jay Bhattacharya. And they targeted anybody that didn't go along with whatever. And it's unfortunate. I wish, you know, there should be accountability to it. On the other hand, I hate to waste a lot of time on accountability when we have to get ready for this next pandemic. I'm very worried that the bird flu pandemic will be the great pandemic. Try to argue with our country, and I'll continue to argue that the greatest threat to our national security is not China, Russia, Iran, or North Korea.

[02:26:02]

The greatest threat to our national security in 2025 is biosecurity. And in that biosecurity, the looming threat that we have right now is bird flu and the potential of bird flu, particularly bird flu if we have unregulated gain-of-function research. Bird flu could cause a global pandemic in months. I don't think that's going to happen from birds and cows, pigs. I think it's going to struggle. I do think it could happen from the laboratory.

[Del Bigtree]

CDC's Role and Preparedness

And you've said that if it happens in the near future, that's the most likely scenario.

[Robert Redfield]

But I hope we can curtail laboratory, but that's my concern.

[Del Bigtree]

The CDC seems to me in many ways... I mean, you never wore the military garb, but you could have, right? Isn't that the...

[Robert Redfield]

Well, I could have gone back in. I've been a three-star admiral, but I didn't do that. Yeah. I retired from the army as a colonel, and I was content with that.

[02:27:05]

[Del Bigtree]

The CDC, though, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, I mean, one of its number one jobs is focused, especially since the whole reason for liability protection, I think in many ways, the way Reagan didn't... I mean, I don't think he was an anti-free market guy. I think the threat seemed to be if you have a global pandemic or if we get attacked with a bioweapon, you need to be able to ramp up vaccines. You can't ramp them up if nobody's making any in our country. And it seems like to me, that was some of the argument with giving liability protection.

[Robert Redfield]

I think, I don't know. I mean, I have a different hope for the nation. I think it was a lot of efforts that were starting to emerge. I can't remember now. I think it was about 1980 that we were losing vaccine companies. It wasn't that we were actually... We were losing companies that were willing to make vaccines. Because they were getting so many lawsuits. And they couldn't predict how to price things to prepare for those lawsuits.

[02:28:03]

A lot of easy ways to resolve that. We can just cap those lawsuits. I mean, if I want to take away liability, which I mean, I want them to be liable again for their products, but I don't have a problem capping the liability. Right. All right. What I want to... Then we would at least see how many cases we're losing. We're seeing everything. We got to step in here. Yeah, we got to take a look at this vaccine. That's right, yeah.

[Del Bigtree]

Well, let me get to the point because I don't want to hold you up.

[Robert Redfield]

I wanted to finish one thing before because I started on the biosecurity issue. And you talked about we need the vaccine companies. My view is that we need to develop a program in the United States that's proportional to the threat. I think the threat is real. It's big. If you didn't believe it, the COVID pandemic should have given you a little taste of the impact of a biological agent on our nation. We lost a million, two people, but- I'm more concerned with the government's impact on our nation. Okay, but you are. You had a lot of...

[02:29:01]

[Del Bigtree]

I agree. For the elderly and those that have other comorbidities, it was very problematic.

[Robert Redfield]

We had a lot of government overreach. Yeah. We lost a lot of our rights. Okay, so that's the same thing. Our economy took a tank. Yeah. All right. But what I'm saying is the next pandemic, the great pandemic, which I think is going to be a bird flu pandemic, is going to be 20-fold worse, 30-fold worse. I would like us to get prepared for that pandemic. I would like us to have a response proportional to the threat. I just told you it's the most important national security threat we have. For the traditional security threat, we have this thing called the Department of Defense. We spend a lot of money, 800,900 billion a year. We've developed a great network of private sector contractors that make our planes. They make our missiles. They make our bullets. They make everything we need. I'm arguing we need to do the same thing for biosecurity. I need an agency.

[02:30:00]

DOD doesn't want to do it. I think an agency that might be the right agency is the Department of Energy. They got five labs that are very good. They could manage the contracts from the private sector, which now we build a group of private sector contractors like the Northrop's, like the Boeing's, but we do it in vaccine. We do it antiviral. We do it in diagnostics. We do it in PPE. We do it medical instruments. When the COVID pandemic hit, we didn't have enough ventilators for this country. Mike Pence went up to Michigan to get Ford to flip over one of its production lines to make ventilators rather than cars. If our nation doesn't get prepared, we're going to be sucking wind when the next thing comes. I'm still going to try to argue. Maybe you'll look into this and get on the bandwagon and start to argue the United States can get prepared. There is something we can do and we can improve our manufacturing capability for vaccines or for countermeasures.

[02:31:01]

We can improve our ability to have medical instruments that we might need. The likely thing that's going to bring us to our knees is a respiratory pandemic. It's not going to be Marburg or Ebola. And I've had three Ebola outbreaks when I was CDC director in the DRC. Ebola scares people, but it's never going to wipe out. It's not going to wipe out hundreds of thousands of people, okay? But bird flu could. A respiratory pathogen could. And this is what we need to get more prepared. I've talked a lot on the Hill and the Congress and the Senate, and I'm going to continue to talk. I'm arguing. I'm a senior fellow for the Heritage Foundation for Biosecurity and Public Health Policy. This is what I'm pushing. I'm happy to join my energy with Kennedy on making America healthy again because I really think it's important. We talked a little bit about the food. We didn't have a time this time to talk about chronic disease, but we have to go after chronic disease. We've got to transform our health system where we focus on effective disease management, chronic disease, and put the rewards on health.

[02:32:11]

And we have to get the prevention side going as we talked about with Big Ag. We have a lot of work to do with Big Pharma. They're a big problem right now in terms of making sure the American public can get access to the medicines that they need. But I do believe Kennedy stays focused on that make America healthy again, make America healthy again, make America... Be careful that he doesn't get caught up in the weeds because there's going to be a lot of people trying to bait him to get into the weeds and then try to get some good people around him. He's got good people around him. He's bringing in on the inside, get some good people like me and others that are helping him on the outside to really drive forward. I mean, if he can succeed in the next two years, which I think he could, making measurable improvements in the health of America, particularly through the agricultural issues for children, he will really line up the Trump administration to have a much better 2026 future.

[02:33:16]

[Del Bigtree]

Gain of Function and Bird Flu

I agree. I think you're aligned on curtailing gain of function, which I think we could all argue is the most likely scenario to really create a bird flu pandemic. Maybe not the only one, but very likely that that could happen.

CDC's Preparedness for Biological Threats

And just sort of to wrap this up, CDC is designed to be ready for a biological attack, whether it be natural or weaponized. I mean, it seems like that's one of its primary functions. In this case, our government immediately just said, this is natural, which seems unnatural to me. In a paranoid world where we have terrorists everywhere, we're worried about labs we don't control all over the world.

[02:34:05]

Yet as soon as we had something that swept the country that made no sense in nature, we went out of our way to just immediately scream, this is natural. Now, and we're thinking you were against it then and slightly vocal, now we know it's a lab, or at least most of us that look at the science, it's the most obvious explanation. How do we know it was accidental?

[Robert Redfield]

We don't. We don't know it was accidental. I think, you know, I argued already that once we got past the first six months, the answer is going to come from the intelligence community. You know, the problem we have with this whole issue, and I agree with you, there was a lack of transparency, but science leaders that we should expect, which is antithetical to science, which makes me concerned that the intelligence community was involved. All right.

[02:35:02]

Clearly the CIA's analysis is not accurate. And then you even heard some, you know, some whistleblowers that suggested that like six or seven of them voted, it came from the lab, but the head guy said, no, it came from, you know, it came from nature. And then I know Radcliffe's going to get to it because, you know, Radcliffe knows all the intelligence, and I've talked to John a lot, and I'm pretty confident that all the intelligence community are going to reevaluate their assessments, all right, and allow the energy department and the FBI, neither of which got to present to Biden, all right, and allow them to present to all the agencies the data that they have that came them to their conclusions. And I think that we will see before Easter, all of the agents revise their analysis to say that it came from the lab. And I think that's important because then we can get that behind us. Now, you have to, I do think the intelligence agencies were involved in why we didn't get this right.

[02:36:05]

You know, why didn't we get this right? You know, on the one hand, it was the greatest intelligence failure probably ever.

[Del Bigtree]

I mean, across the board, you had scientists at WHO, some out of Switzerland said, I watched the task force being put together by WHO, and they didn't bring in a virologist. They didn't bring in anyone that had been studying coronavirus. It looked like a cover-up.

[Robert Redfield]

I sent them 25. Would you agree it looks like something's being covered up? I sent them 20-something names to go in January, all right. I had a team of about 25 people ready to go the first week in January, but we couldn't get permission to go. I had the president even call the president of China to get us permission to go. Right. We never got permission to go. I gave those names also to Tedros, though, when he was putting the group together. Only one person on my list, I don't even think he was on my list, one person, a Chinese guy from CDC got put on the list, and then Cliff Lane from NIH got, and all the others were, and they all had to be vetted and approved by China, which is totally inappropriate.

[02:37:09]

Right. So, I think there clearly was a, when I argue, when people were telling me I was conspiratorial and trying to influence negatively my life and my opportunities, I said on multiple times publicly, the conspiracy is those guys. Yeah. They had a conspiracy that only one hypothesis would get the light of day, and that was spillover, spillover. And they clearly ran the media, all right? And I think they manipulated the intelligence agencies, except for they finally, the FBI and the Energy Department had the courage to come out, and they're scientists, and they called it the way they saw it. And they're right. And I guarantee you when John gets in there, there'll be a revision of this, and hopefully Trump before Easter will have, DEI will come out with a new assessment that they all lie out.

[Del Bigtree]

Is it too late? I mean, it seems to me it'd be too late.

[02:38:01]

I mean, I'm not, I don't mean to like start a war with China or anything, but certainly I'm shocked that no one in media asked, once we now look at labs, no one's asking the next obvious question, how do we know it was accidental? We saw President Trump had really evened the playing field with China. So you had a reason, you know, financially, China wanted to sort of get back on top. It worked that way. All of our businesses were shut down. It was Chinese goods that poured in. I'm just saying, I'm not, you know, I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but I am a journalist. And aren't we, like science, supposed to ask all the appropriate questions? And the appropriate questions aren't being asked. But I want to say this. It's probably too late to determine if there was a chance that it was released on purpose. But if it was, and government agents like Tony Fauci ran in to cover it up and blame it on nature, isn't that treasonous?

Treasonous Actions and Cover-Ups

If you got involved with, you know, if he accidentally even helped another nation, you know, bring about a demise of our nation.

[02:39:05]

[Robert Redfield]

I would say even if it was, as I postulate it was, accidental, the fact that they helped cover it up is a serious problem. All right? Serious problem. Because to me, the bulk of the evidence never, never supported spillover. And the bulk of the evidence always supported and then continued to support laboratory. And even to this day, they still sort of say, but the most likely, in my opinion, is spillover. Well, they're wrong. And I think that's a real problem. You know, I don't think, and I think we're going to find out. I do think the Chinese, I think, I've always said, I think the intelligence community plus a Chinese whistleblower or two or three or four will bring this to light in the next three to five years. Maybe the Chinese government themselves may clean up, clean this up if there's international economic consequences for them to come clean.

[02:40:10]

They clearly knew this pandemic started in August, September, and they clearly didn't make the American people, the world aware of it until December. And then they set up this, I mean, I told you, you know, I think I told you before when I talked to my counterpart, George Gao, you know, on New Year's Eve in 2019, he told me he had 27 cases. I said, George, he's a very good coronavirologist. I said, George, what's your case definition? He said, it's patients with a non-specified pneumonia that isn't flu and isn't SARS that came from the wet market. I said, wait a minute, Joe, what do you mean they came from? I said, George, then by definition, everybody came from the wet market because that's your case definition. Why are you trying to pin this on the wet market? And again, I think that was the beginning of trying to make this SARS-like, MERS-like wet market get away from the lab.

[02:41:06]

All right. I know Tony had talked to George a couple of times. I talked to George. I said, George, you got to get outside the wet market. Joy heard the conversation. I said, you got to test people outside the wet market. Nothing to do with the wet market that have unspecified pneumonias, not SARS and flu. And he called me about two or three days later. He said, Bob, it has nothing to do with the wet market. This is the head of CDC, China. He said, we have hundreds and hundreds of cases that has nothing to do with the wet market. And yet, from the beginning of January to even today, people are saying it had the wet market. When the head of CDC China and the head of CDC America are saying it's not the wet market, and yet NIH is saying it's the wet market?

Conspiracy and Gain-of-Function Research

And I think it was all a plan to turn the attention away from the lab, which, by the way, they were funding, along with our government. But more importantly, turn away the attention that this could have been related to the platform science they were doing, which was gain-of-function research, which is big money.

[02:42:10]

And it's big scientific fame. And one thing I can tell you about scientists, and I am one, my parents were scientists, they don't want the government regulating what they do. And the government needs to go in and regulate gain-of-function research. And hopefully Rand Paul, along with President Trump, will move in to start regulating this research. People argue against me, say, Bob, you can't regulate the whole world. I said, well, you guys are trying to do climate control. It doesn't seem to stop you for that. I want to stop gain-of-function research. And any country that wants to help a company or university doing gain-of-function research, I want to censor them from any U.S. funding for research. And I guarantee you very rapidly, they'll stop. Because, you know, U.S. is the biggest biomedical research funder in the world. So if you're Germany and you're doing gain-of-function research, and I just say, fine, no university in Germany, no company in Germany is going to get NIH funding, they'll change it in no time.

[02:43:11]

[Del Bigtree]

Restoring Trust in Regulatory Agencies

That seems like that has to happen. I mean, I think that, I mean, those are the things when we look at Robert Kennedy, Jr., Marty McAree, you know, Dr. Mehmet Oz, you know, these guys seem focused on being more transparent. There's a huge job to be done to bring confidence back to the regulatory agencies.

[Robert Redfield]

It's really, it's really important, Del. It takes years to build credibility. When I was CDC director, they really lectured me about being careful what I say, because if I was wrong and inaccurate in public health, I could destroy credibility that took the agency years to gain.

[02:44:00]

You can destroy it in a minute. And we really have hurt confidence in public health. And in science. And it's going to take a long time. It's going to take a long time to recover. I'm excited about having people with the integrity and the honesty and the openness that Bobby Kennedy has and the people that he's picked, because I think they have one thing in common, they're honest. They're not afraid to tell the truth. They've learned the phrase, you know, I don't know, as opposed to feeling they have to have an answer. I told Tony on a number of occasions, I said, Tony, why don't you just tell people you don't know? If you don't know, you know, don't feel you have to create an answer. And so I hope we can regain it.

[02:45:00]

You asked me about CDC being prepared to respond.

CDC Overhaul and Funding

The problem that CDC has, and I was its director, and I was so excited when I got that opportunity, but I was so shocked when I found out how little had been invested in the agency to do its primary job, where it's supposed to be a public health response agency. I tell the one story about my first briefing about the end of the first week I was there. It was on opioid deaths because President Trump made it a priority. I almost lost one of my children from fentanyl. And they did a great briefing. And when it was over, I asked the head briefer what the data was through. And this was in April of 2018. And he turned to me, the data is through March 2015. I said, wait a minute, we're talking about the leading cause of death of young people, 80,000. We're the public health response agency. We're trying to do a plan. Trump just put a bunch of money into this. And you're telling me that I'm going to design my plan on data that was from March 2015.

[02:46:06]

And they said, director, you don't understand the complexity of collecting data from the states. And I made a few enemies that day. I said, you know what? I came down here excited that I was going to make an impact on public health and the human condition. And what you're telling me is I really came down here to be a medical historian. Because CDC is morphed into an agency that thinks of itself like an academic institution, not as a public health response agency. And partially that's because we never really funded it appropriately. We didn't fund laboratory resilience. We didn't fund data management. I mean, I had when some measles outbreak happened, I had the health department sending me stuff by fax machine. We don't have a comprehensive data management system. We don't have an adequate workforce. In some states, I had less than 20 people when the COVID pandemic happened that could do any field work.

[02:47:01]

So I went to Congress and argued for data modernization, got some money, $350 million, not enough to do it. But I would argue there has to be, and I've argued, I argued with Rochelle, and she tried to lay this out, that CDC needs to be a public health response agency, not an academic institution. I had several occasions when I had data, like at the health assembly in New York, and I was in some meetings with ministers of health, and I shared the data. And CDC's leadership came to me afterwards and kind of yelled at me. I was only the director. Said, you shouldn't have shared that data. I said, well, why shouldn't I have not shared it? Is the data not accurate? Well, no, the data is accurate. Well, did we misinterpret the data? No, the interpretation was right on. I said, then why shouldn't I have repainted it? Because it's part of a paper that's supposed to be published in the New England Journal, and we're not allowed to tell anybody about it for another couple months.

[02:48:07]

I said, what? I said, what? So the problem was they saw themselves as an academic institution. They promoted people based on numbers of papers published, not on whether they helped me in the three Ebola outbreaks in the Congo. So the agency needs a total overhaul. But part of that overhaul, which is not popular, is it also has to be actually funded to be a public health response agency. I wanted to take the 15,000 people in Atlanta and split them out to the 50 states. I don't need 50,000 people in Atlanta. I wanted to have 300,000, 500,000 people in different states around the country so that we have a public health workforce for the nation. So it needs a lot of work.

[02:49:00]

It has an important mission, but they've gotten totally sidetracked. They could help Kennedy and us because one of the programs we had that was pretty big is our chronic disease program. It's not just an infectious disease agency. It can do chronic disease, but it's got to do it in a measurable way to make impact. It doesn't help us just to tell you what chronic disease looked like five years ago. What is it today, and what are the hypotheses that we can do something so it's less tomorrow? Right.

[Del Bigtree]

Closing Remarks and Future Collaboration

I want to thank you for taking the time. It's really been fascinating to get perspective on the inside. We've all watched it from the outside. I do think it was a dark day for science going through COVID. You did get yourself into some trouble speaking truth, as did everybody. But I hope you'll continue to speak the truth. We need you right now.

[Robert Redfield]

Thanks a lot, Dells. Great to be with you. Hope we can continue our conversation.

[02:50:01]

[Del Bigtree]

Definitely.