BREAKING: Former CDC head tells MTG Covid was likely a result of gain-of-function research

Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Green spoke during the Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic on Wednesday, which focused mainly on the origins of Covid and specifically whether Covid was made in a lab or the result of a leak from the virology lab in Hubei province, China.

Among those invited as witnesses was Dr. Robert Redfield, the former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention under President Donald Trump, who, while speaking with Greene, said that the Covid-19 virus looked as though it was altered in a lab.



"Did you agree in your opinion with [Kristian Andersen, a virologist at the Scripps Research Institute in California]'s assessment at the time that this virus did look engineered," she asked Dr. Redfield, who said he was "concerned."

"It's important to understand what cleavage site does... It changes the orientation of the binding domain of Covid. So now it could not see the Ace2 receptor, it totally changes the orientation now so it has a high affinity for human receptors... It didn't seem that it belonged there," he said, asking why this virus had the arginine sequences for humans rather than bats, which he said was a sign this virus was "engineered."

Greene asked if this was something that would be in line with gain of function research, to which Redfield answered "Yeah."

Last week, Federal Bureau of Investigation director Christopher Wray confirmed in an interview with Fox News that his agency believed the lab leak hypothesis was the most probable explanation for the origins of Covid-19.

"The FBI has for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan," Wray said.
 

He went on to explain that the FBI "has folks, agents, professionals, analysts, virologists, microbiologists, etc, who focus, specifically, on the dangers of biological threats, which includes things like novel viruses like COVID, and the concerns that in the wrong hands some bad guys, some hostile nation-state, a terrorist, a criminal, the threats that could pose."