Robert Redfield, the former head of the US Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, said mandating Covid-19 vaccine was a “terrible decision” and lockdowns and school closures were a “big mistake”.
Dr Redfield, an esteemed virologist who led the CDC from 2018 to 2021, said the pharmaceutical giants had a “huge influence” on convincing governments that everyone including children should be coerced into being vaccinated and boosted during the pandemic.
“We absolutely never should have mandated vaccines, it was a terrible decision … the rationale for mandating vaccines for healthy firefighters and policemen, those in the military, hospital workers, teachers, was emotional, It wasn’t and it shouldn’t have happened,” he said in an interview with Chris Cuomo published on Wednesday (Thursday AEST).
Dr Redfield, 72, said the Covid-19 vaccines, which the Biden administration worked to prevent serious illness and death for vulnerable, older patients “over 65” but weren’t suitable for health young people, didn’t prevent transmission and wore off after six months at most.
“If you came down and visited me and interviewed my patients, you’d interview patient after patient that did not have Covid, but are very sick, long covid patients, and it’s all from the vaccine,” he added, in comments that would have been censored on social media and censured publicly during the pandemic.
A ‘v-safe’ survey by the CDC released in late 2022 found 7.7 per cent of around a million American recipients sought medical attention after their Covid-19 vaccination. Western Australian data published last year found the Covid-19 vaccines, which were lauded as safe and effective, caused injuries at 24 times the rate of other approved vaccines.
“I remember Biden saying, you know, this is a pandemic of the unvaccinated. … I was saying, wait a minute, two thirds of the people that I’m seeing infected in Maryland have been vaccinated, these vaccines don’t last”.
Dr Redfield, who continues to practise medicine privately in Maryland, was sidelined in 2020 for suggesting SARS-Cov2, the virus that causes Covid-19, might have leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology rather than ‘spilt over’ from the animal kingdom naturally, a theory that’s since become more credible.
In a one-hour interview with Mr Cuomo, whose brother Andrew Cuomo as New York governor became the face of tough Covid-19 mandates in 2020, Dr Redfield said countries “made a big mistake and paid a big price” by locking down their societies for months, on and off for up to two years.
“You know, I’m not sure people will accept responsibility, those people that really pushed it, because it was unfortunate, it was emotional,” he said. “There’s no question there was overreach,
Following China’s example, most governments imposed lockdowns from March 2020, lasting well into 2021 in some jurisdictions, unprecedented policies that triggered massive public borrowing, record unemployment, inflation, social unrest and permanent learning loss, in the US at least, for students from low-income families.
“I was very much against closing schools, I thought the kids were probably safer in schools, most kids were getting infected in the community and from the dinner table, not from the school, a lot of that was emotionalism with teachers,” he said.
Dr Redfield’s interview emerged a few days after Dr Anthony Fauci, president Joe Biden’s former top Covid-19 adviser, admitted in widely reported congressional testimony that the ‘lab leak theory’ was no longer a conspiracy theory and pandemic measures should “consider the balance” of costs and benefits next time.
