A former director of the CDC under Donald Trump says he believes COVID-19 may have been 𝐛𝐨𝐫𝐧 in a North Carolina laboratory as part of a secret biodefense program.

Robert Redfield has previously been a proponent of the ‘lab leak’ theory which posits the disease came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China.

Now Redfield – a frequent critic of Dr. Anthony Fauci – says that the disease may have origins in the Tar Heel State.

Appearing on the Third Opinion podcast, Redfield flat out stated that COVID-19 was ‘intentionally engineered as a part of a biodefense program.’

He now argues that China did not necessarily create the virus and did the best that they could once ‘they realized they had a problem.

However, he calls the United States’ role in the development of the virus ‘substantial.’

He claims that the American government holds responsibility for funding research into the NIH, USAID and the Department of Defense.

He then calls out researcher Dr. Ralph Baric from the University of North Carolina, whom he calls ‘the scientific mastermind’ behind all of this.

‘I think he probably helped create some of the original viral lines, but I can’t prove that. But he was very involved,’ he said.

When pressed on whether the virus was ‘actually developed here’ and that the Chinese may have been wrongfully accused of developing the virus, Redfield doubles down.

‘Well, I don’t know if they were framed, but I think there is a real possibility that the virus’s 𝐛𝐢𝐫𝐭𝐡place was Chapel Hill,’ Redfield said, naming the hometown of the University of North Carolina.

DailyMail.com has reached out to Dr. Baric for comment.

The virus is believed to have originated in bats, but debate is currently raging over whether it leaked from the Wuhan lab – and whether it was modified by Chinese scientists to become more contagious beforehand.

Redfield, who was CDC director under the Trump administration, has in the past said Fauci was ‘holding on tightly’ to the theory that the virus evolved naturally, before likening the White House COVID tsar to a ‘dog with a bone.’

And in 2021, he slammed the ‘highly compromised’ World Health Organization for not cracking down on China at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, and for letting its communist government dictate the terms of the WHO probe into the origins of COVID.

Donald Trump and his supporters were widely derided for sharing the same theory when he was president.

Redfield, who doesn’t believe the virus was intentionally leaked by China, said COVID-19’s ability to spread rapidly from human-to-human was unlike other coronaviruses such as SARS.

Redfield said he was ‘disappointed’ there was a lack of openness within the scientific community early on to investigate both hypotheses.

Some scientists, the media and academics long heaped scorn on the lab leak hypothesis, insisting that it was a fringe conspiracy theory and even racist after Donald Trump embraced the idea.

New evidence, including reports of three workers at the Wuhan lab who fell seriously ill with COVID-like symptoms in November 2019, has forced a sober reassessment among doubters.

Redfield went on to say that it was a ‘critical error’ to treat COVID-19 the same as SARS in January and February last year.

‘By calling it SARS-like, we mounted a public health response that was mirrored off SARS. The problem is, COVID is nothing like SARS,’ Redfield said, adding that response was ‘flawed’.

Redfield acknowledged that he should have pushed harder for the CDC to be allowed into the Wuhan lab when the virus first emerged and said the World Health Organization was compromised by China.

‘I think they were highly compromised. Clearly they were incapable of compelling China to adhere to the treaty agreements they have on global health,’ Redfield said.