Scientific American Thinks It Knows More Than Former CDC Director
In last week’s interview with former CDC Director Robert Redfield, I asked him about editors at Scientific American who tried to damage his reputation by alleging he’s not an expert on viruses
Redfield is a virologist and infectious disease physician and one of the few people in public health who has a top secret security clearance with compartmentalization, known as TS/SCI (Sensitive Compartmented Information).
This is the highest U.S. government security clearance level.
During a March 2021 interview with CNN, Redfield said that evidence suggested that the pandemic likely came from a lab in Wuhan, China.
There was one problem with this: 2021 was when anyone questioning if the pandemic came from a Chinese lab was being labelled a racist and conspiracy theorist.
Sure enough, Scientific American’s Laura Helmuth rose to the occasion, posting on X that Redfield shared the “conspiracy theory that the virus came from the Wuhan lab.” Helmuth then signaled to her followers in the science writing community to “get the science right, make it clear that Redfield is not an authority on the relevant science.”
Helmuth then sicced her deputy, Josh Fischman, on Redfield. Fischman wrote a piece supporting virologists with ties to the Wuhan lab by claiming that Redfield “made news this week w/ an evidence-free claim about a lab leak.”
At the time this played out, I had no clue that Redfield was a virologist with decades of experience in infectious disease research. I also didn’t realize that he had the highest security clearance possible in the United States and had reviewed all the classified material about how the pandemic started. (Redfield also told me in the interview that not all the intelligence material pointing to a lab accident has been declassified.)
When I asked Redfield about these charges by Scientific American’s editors, he said there was a “conspiracy” to silence people speaking out about a lab accident. So I asked Scientific American to explain their thinking and emailed Kim Lau, who is the President of Scientific American and VP of Consumer Media at Springer Nature, the magazine’s publisher.
How is a virologist with decades of research experience in infectious disease, and who has reviewed the classified material not an expert, I asked?
Here’s the questions I sent to Lau:
1) How is someone with decades experience in infectious diseases with a TS/SCI not an authority?
2) Do either Helmuth or Fischman have expertise in infectious diseases?
3) Do either Helmuth or Fischman have security clearances to view classified material gathered to figure out how the pandemic started?
4) Does Scientific American believe that reviewing classified material does not serve as evidence?
5) Does Scientific American stand behind the statements of Helmuth and Fischman?
Despite repeated requests for an explanation, Lau did not respond.
Scientific American shoved Laura Helmuth out the door in late 2024, after I exposed her angry tweets on Bluesky in which she called members of Gen X “fucking fascists” and castigated the country—“fuck them to the moon and back”—for going to the polls and electing Donald Trump.
See more here substack.com
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