Redfield's Warning

For more than four decades Robert Redfield has been one of America’s preeminent virologists. During the Covid pandemic he served as director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force and the board of Operation Warp Speed. Among many other positions of responsibility, he has been the administrator of the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry and Maryland’s senior public health advisor. Currently he is a visiting Senior Fellow for biosecurity and public health policy at the Heritage Foundation.Both of Dr. Redfield’s parents were scientists at the National Institutes of Health. He is a graduate of Georgetown Medical School and received further training at the Army’s renowned Walter Reed Army Medical Center where he developed a strong interest in infectious disease and the study of viruses, focusing on HIV, hepatitis, and hemorrhagic viruses. His early work reinforced his belief in the power of science but also taught him to embrace his faith and find the courage to speak out even when it is not popular.Throughout his distinguished career he has tried to honor the spirit of Theodore Roosevelt’s “Man in the Arena”: “The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs . . . and knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause . . . who, at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory or defeat.”

“Former CDC Director Robert Redfield, MD provides us with a riveting account of his experience in the eye of the COVID-19 storm, detailing the internal deliberations, policy debates, and successes and failures of federal officials. Once called a ‘conspiracy theorist’ and ‘racist’ for asserting the novel and deadly coronavirus originated in a Chinese Communist lab, Redfield’s initial convictions have since been vindicated by later congressional investigations and intelligence assessments. As with COVID-19, the next deadly pandemic could come from a lab, where scientists engage in dangerous ‘gain of function’ research: the genetic manipulation of pathogens to enhance their transmissibility and virulence, making them deadly to humans. Bad actors plague our world. That is why Redfield insists that Washington must make biosecurity a top priority. Our safety depends on it.” —Robert Emmet Moffit, PhD, senior research fellow at The Heritage Foundation and former principal deputy assistant secretary at the US Department of Health and Human Services during the Reagan administration“Dr. Robert Redfield is a visionary. I was working on the Bellevue wards treating AIDS patients in the mid to late 1980s when he engendered controversy by stating that HIV could be transmitted heterosexually. At the time, I was already treating such cases, and those of us on the front lines applauded his medical courage. When it came to COVID, he was one of the first and loudest voices to state that COVID likely came from the lab, and since then, many others have fallen in line behind his leadership on that likelihood. Redfield is a man of great faith and great heart, and he says what he believes and what decades of knowledge tell him to be true. In this book, Redfield’s Warning, he again shows his great vision when he warns of the next pandemic which he knows is coming. And ‘the virus that causes it might be thousands of years old,’ he writes. A zombie virus that can’t hurt us until someone plays with it in a lab. Or bird flu, a pathogen he knows well, where Dr. Redfield has personally fought against the very gain-of-function research that has provided a clear road map for human-to-human spread to terrorists. Dr. Redfield provides a lesson from COVID that our tools of response should not cause more of a public health crisis than the virus does. At the same time, Redfield has a clear view of our infectious future, and he is worried. We would be wise to be worried too and to take the steps he outlines, which are needed to prepare and to protect ourselves.”—Marc Siegel, MD, is a clinical professor of medicine and medical director of Doctor Radio at NYU Langone Health. He is Fox News senior medical analyst and author of the upcoming book The Miracles Among Us“Dr. Robert Redfield has written a book that is brilliant, bold, reflective, and full of recommendations for the future. His life story is one of great consequence, vision, and commitment to the mission of disease detection, prevention, and pursuit of cures. Redfield faced opposition at many turns in his storied career beginning with his pioneering research into HIV and AIDs. He discovered that HIV wasn’t just a gay man’s disease, it was a public health catastrophe for any and all in the world population exposed to it. The lessons of AIDs were reflected in his analysis and approach as CDC director of the massive threat of COVID 19, which he grasped earlier than virtually any other public health expert. He also scientifically diagnosed the likely proximal origin of COVID—a leak of a synthetically altered virus from a Chinese lab affiliated with the military’s virological capabilities development program. Bob Redfield is an American visionary, patriot, and hero.”—David L. Asher, PhD, senior fellow at Hudson Institute“Dr. Redfield is a truthteller, a former insider who knows it all.  He lays out a stark reality, and I am using his words: ‘The days of believing authorities because they are in an authoritative position are over.’”—Gavin de Becker, bestselling author, The Gift of Fear