Former CDC Director Received Death Threats Over COVID-19 "Lab Leak" Theory From Other Scientists
By Brandon Morse | Jun 03, 2021 5:00 PM ET
Being a public figure will net you some nasty attention no matter who you are or what you do and from time to time, you’re going to get some death threats. These usually come from people on the internet who feel secure saying these things behind a wall of anonymity and a keyboard miles away from the intended target.
Former CDC Director Robert Redfield also received his share of death threats after he expressed his belief that the COVID-19 virus did, in fact, leak from a lab in China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology. Only his weren’t just from anonymous trolls, it was from the scientific community, including people he knew.
In a reveal to Vanity Fair, Redfield said that after a CNN interview where he expressed this belief, his inbox was flooded with angry responses including death threats from people he even once considered friends:
By spring of 2021, the debate over COVID-19’s origins had become so noxious that death threats were flying in both directions.
In a CNN interview on March 26, Dr. Redfield, the former CDC director under Trump, made a candid admission: “I am of the point of view that I still think the most likely etiology of this pathogen in Wuhan was from a laboratory, you know, escaped.” Redfield added that he believed the release was an accident, not an intentional act. In his view, nothing that happened since his first calls with Dr. Gao changed a simple fact: The WIV needed to be ruled out as a source, and it hadn’t been.
After the interview aired, death threats flooded his inbox. The vitriol came not just from strangers who thought he was being racially insensitive but also from prominent scientists, some of whom used to be his friends. One said he should just “wither and die.”
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https://redstate.com/brandon_morse/2021/06/03/former-cdc-director-received-death-threats-over-covid-19-lab-leak-theory-from-other-scientists-n390833