Former CDC Director Calls for Removal of mRNA COVID-19 Vaccines

‘There’s too many unknowns,’ Dr. Robert Redfield said.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Commissioner Robert Redfield speaks during a White House Coronavirus Task Force press briefing in the James Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House on Nov. 19, 2020. Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images

COVID-19 vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna should be pulled from circulation, a former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention official said in a new interview.

“I really would like to see the mRNA vaccine use curtailed, and personally, I'd like to see it eliminated, because I think there’s too many unknowns,” Dr. Robert Redfield told EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders” in an interview released on Dec. 9.

Pfizer and Moderna vaccines against COVID-19 utilize messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) technology. They were the first mRNA vaccines to receive clearance when regulators authorized them in late 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Redfield, 74, was the director of the CDC from March 2018 through Jan. 20, 2021, the end of President Donald Trump’s first term.

Redfield said he’s been treating patients who have so-called long COVID, as well as people suffering from vaccine injuries. He said he still favors a protein-based COVID-19 vaccine from Novavax but no longer advises receiving the mRNA shots even though he thinks they prevented deaths among seniors early in the pandemic.

“I don’t advocate the mRNA vaccines anymore, because as you get to the idea of vaccine injury, when I give you an mRNA vaccine, what I do is I turn your body into a spike protein production factory,” Redfield told The Epoch Times. “And spike protein is a very immunotoxic protein.”

Based on the current data, it is unclear how much spike protein one produces following vaccination and how long it is produced, Redfield said.

“My long COVID patients seem to get better quicker than my vaccine injury patients,” he said. “And some of us wonder whether or not that mRNA that has caused that injury ... is still not transcriptionally active in producing new mRNA, in other words, with new spike protein.”

Patients with vaccine injuries have slowly been improving, and it’s important for people to realize they can ultimately recover from the injuries, Redfield said.

Spike protein generation and persistence has drawn attention from a number of experts, both inside and outside the government.

Dr. Vinay Prasad, a top Food and Drug Administration official, in the fall withdrew emergency authorizations for the COVID-19 vaccines. In one of the documents outlining narrower, updated approvals for the vaccines, Prasad wrote that “there is growing clinical evidence that spike protein which is generated as a result of or in the course of vaccination may persist for some time in a subset of individuals,” which could result in what is described by some as long COVID.

Charlotte Kuperwasser, a professor of developmental, molecular, and chemical biology at Tufts University School of Medicine, in a presentation to a federal vaccine committee in September, referenced studies that have found mRNA in various parts of the body weeks, months, and even years after vaccination. After the presentation, CDC advisers said the agency should adjust COVID-19 vaccine recommendations to an emphasis on individual factors, which the agency did.

Post-Vaccination Deaths

Redfield is aware that federal regulators recently determined that at least 10 child deaths were related to COVID-19 vaccination. Officials have not released details such as the causes of death, but Prasad said in a memo outlining the investigation that it was motivated by the awareness of FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary and other leaders of reports about the heart inflammation that the COVID-19 vaccines are known to cause.

“I had confidence that Marty Makary would go in and open up what we know about the vaccine injuries that are occurring, and make them available to the American public so they can re-evaluate the value of the COVID vaccine,” Redfield said.

He said later, “The recognition that they now seem to attribute at least 10 children’s deaths from the mRNA vaccines is a breath of fresh air.”

Spokespeople for Pfizer and Novavax did not respond to or declined to comment on the development, and a Moderna spokesman pointed to a company statement from September in which Moderna said that global surveillance data demonstrate the safety of its vaccine for children and that safety monitoring systems in the United States and other places “have not reported any new or undisclosed safety concerns in children or in pregnant women.”

Redfield also said he does not think there was ever a reason for children to receive one of the COVID-19 vaccines, given that most children suffered no or limited symptoms from COVID-19 and data indicated the vaccines did not prevent infection or transmission.

As a senior, though, the doctor still gets vaccinated on a regular basis.

“I have been vaccinated myself, eight times. The COVID vaccine has one of the biggest challenges. It doesn’t last,” he said. “So I get vaccinated every six months—but with the protein vaccine—because I’m still at risk. I’m at risk for hospitalization and death if I get COVID.”

Correction: A previous version of this article misspelled the name of Tufts University School of Medicine professor Charlotte Kuperwasser. The Epoch Times regrets the error.