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Former CDC Director Robert Redfield, MD, that he believed SARS-CoV-2 was spreading in Wuhan as early as September or October of 2019.

Redfield said the "most likely etiology" of the pathogen was that it had "escaped" from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which had been conducting experiments with bat coronaviruses.

"Other people don't believe that," he acknowledged to CNN's Sanjay Gupta. But, it's "not unusual for respiratory pathogens being worked on in a laboratory to infect a laboratory worker."

He said he believed it was less likely that it simply jumped from bat to human in a spillover episode because when a zoonotic virus jumps into humans it can't optimize transmission quickly.

SARS-CoV-2, on the other hand, became one of the most infectious viruses in history, he said.

Redfield noted that when researchers work on a virus in a lab, they often try to "make it grow better and better."

None of the other physicians interviewed by Gupta for a post-mortem on the COVID-19 crisis in the U.S. commented on the origin of the virus. For the Sunday evening special, Gupta interviewed six doctors: Redfield; NIAID Director Anthony Fauci, MD; former coronavirus task force coordinator Deborah Birx, MD; former FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn, MD; former Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response Robert Kadlec, MD; and former Assistant Secretary for Health Brett Giroir, MD.

A World Health Organization team allowed into China to investigate the origin of the virus doesn't think it came from a laboratory. However, an leaked to the Associated Press admits that "the evolutionary distance between these bat viruses and SARS-CoV-2 is estimated to be several decades, suggesting a missing link."

And the WHO researchers acknowledged China's lack of transparency throughout the pandemic, which wasn't unprecedented. Fauci told Gupta that during the first SARS outbreak in 2003, China had early on diminished the outbreak, but then "the next thing you know it was all over the world."

"They have not been transparent in the past," Fauci said. "It's not outright lying, they just didn't give you all the information."

Redfield said he believed the head of the Chinese CDC, George Gao, had been kept in the dark about the extent of the virus' spread in the early days. Around January 4th or 5th of 2020, Redfield mentioned the possibility of human-to-human transmission to Gao and suggested he explore the issue in Wuhan more deeply.

"That evening he told me they found a lot of cases," Redfield said. "He was quite distraught. He came to the conclusion that the cat was out of the bag."

"As soon as George understood it, we did," he said. "I think Wuhan understood it back in the fall" of 2019.

Giroir said he thought China's foot-dragging was the biggest reason that COVID-19 became a global pandemic.

Death Threats and Pressure

Gupta interviewed Fauci and his wife during a walk, noting the Secret Service security detail, which Fauci had since last March when the death threats started rolling in.

Birx said all the doctors involved with the pandemic response received death threats. While she initially sent all the threats against her to the State Department, she was quickly overwhelmed and stopped doing so because she didn't have the time.

What seemed to disturb Birx even more was a call she received from President Donald Trump in August 2020 after a CNN interview in which she bluntly stated that people in rural areas were not immune to the virus and thus needed to take precautions.

Birx said the entire White House was upset by that interview, and it was reported that the president called her directly, but Birx said it was "even more direct than what people have heard. It was very uncomfortable and very direct and very difficult to hear."

When Gupta asked if she was threatened, Birx responded: "I would say it was a very uncomfortable conversation."

The other doctors recounted many uncomfortable conversations, notably with former HHS Secretary Alex Azar, MD.

Hahn suggested that Azar had at one point yelled at him, which Azar denied in a statement to CNN.

Redfield said on more than one occasion Azar called asking him to change something in CDC's Morbidity & Mortality Weekly Report. The last incident in which Azar suggested not making the change would cost thousands of lives was the final straw, he said.

"I had a moment where I said, enough is enough," Redfield said. "If you want to fire me, fire me, I'm not changing MMWR."

Azar denied those allegations too.

On the other hand, the doctors painted a favorable portrait of Vice President Mike Pence. Redfield said Pence was the only one he felt supported by, and Birx credited Pence with giving her liberty to fly around the country and help states get their caseloads down.

"I can say that the vice president is a really a good person, a good human being," Fauci said, noting, however, that their discussions "didn't get agreed upon up the chain."

Birx's Biggest Reveals

Birx made a series of other revelations during the two-hour special.

She told Gupta that after the first 100,000 deaths in the original surge, "all of the rest of them, in my mind, could have been mitigated or decreased substantially if we took the lessons from that moment."

When it came to the gating criteria developed to help states make decisions about reopening, Birx said she didn't think any state would be able to get through all the phases until August at the earliest.

"I didn't see it coming that no one would follow gating criteria," she said, which made seeing images of people gathering on Memorial Day "shocking."

Birx also noted that there were "too many parallel streams of data," some of which -- but not all -- came from the team of Scott Atlas, MD, who Trump had hired in the fall purportedly because Atlas' approach to the pandemic aligned more closely with the former president's.

"I don't know where all of them came from," Birx said. "I think they [the Trump administration] felt that they were defending their position."

Gupta ended by asking each of the six doctors what they would write as the main cause of death on the pandemic's metaphorical death certificate. Their answers included not being prepared (Birx), a lack of transparency from China (Giroir), a lack of public health infrastructure (Redfield), a divisive political environment (Fauci and Hahn), and hubris (Kadlec).

"I hope as a nation," Fauci said, "that we realize we can't do it this way again."

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