On Tuesday at The Heritage Foundation, Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks, R-Iowa, and former Centers for Disease Control Director Robert Redfield shed light on how health officials and President Joe Biden’s administration sought to suppress the COVID-19 lab leak theory.

Miller-Meeks told the audience that the Biden administration worked backward from its preferred conclusion rather than grapple with the “spillover” outbreak theory.

“Either I was stupid, and everybody else was vastly more intelligent than I was, or people don’t want people to know, because science isn’t consensus, and I think that’s the biggest thing,” Miller-Meeks said in her opening remarks, noting that dissenting opinions on the origins of the virus should have been welcomed rather than suppressed.

“Science is a hypothesis. It’s an idea. You do a study, you get a conclusion, you repeat the study to show validity, but it’s not a consensus,” Miller-Meeks added.

Redfield told the audience that “almost every public health decision we made in the first six months of the pandemic was mainly wrong.”

“I was just shocked by the lack of scientific knowledge about this kind of pandemic. Very rapidly, there became a narrative that you either bought into or you were discarded,” Redfield added.

Miller-Meeks, the former director of the Iowa Department of Public Health and an ophthalmologist, was on the COVID-19 subcommittee during the height of the pandemic. Republicans were in the minority, however, and heading into 2022 elections, she argued for the continuation of the committee because the committee was unable “to get answers” and “bring the witnesses they wanted to while under Democratic leadership.”

Miller-Meeks led the subcommittee after Republicans took the majority in the 2022 midterms.

Miller-Meeks witnessed firsthand the controversial testimony of former health advisers Anthony Fauci and Peter Daszak, who attempted to block emails from being released through Freedom of Information Act requests.

Because of the subcommittee’s efforts, the congresswoman mentioned that she began to see the growing public distrust towards the government officials who handled COVID-19 under Biden. She added that this loss of trust in no small part stem from the suppression of the lab leak theory.

“Those who doubted gain of function are now conceptualizing that it was a lab leak and not natural,” Miller-Meeks said. “We still don’t have all of the Scientific papers that were put out in the public sphere and then removed [by the Biden administration]. That sphere was actually looking at genetic sequencing, the current cleavage side, and things that had not existed naturally before.”

Miller-Meeks added that there was “very important information” that was “disseminated” when Republicans took back control of the House, which include China’s actions and intentions, the gain of function research, and what “the Chinese Communist Party was doing with DNA.”

Redfield echoed Miller-Meek’s remarks. The former CDC director claimed that longtime government health officials suppressed information about China while cutting scientists, including himself, out of the process during the Biden administration.

Redfield claimed he was “not included” in key decision-making conversations.

“I didn’t know that they actually had meetings on February 1, when they had the teleconference with a group of scientists that were hand-selected, I believe, by Jerry McFerrin [and] Tony Fauci—and I wasn’t one of those scientists,” he said. “I only found that out with the Freedom of Information Act.”

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