Battered by Trump, Robert Redfield of the C.D.C. Faces Pressure to Speak Out
WASHINGTON — Pressure is mounting on the leaders of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — from inside and outside the agency — to speak publicly against the White House’s manhandling of C.D.C. research and public health decisions, with career scientists so demoralized they are talking of quitting if President Trump wins re-election.
The situation came to a boiling point this week when William H. Foege, a giant in public health who led the C.D.C. under Democratic and Republican presidents, called for its current director, Dr. Robert R. Redfield, to “stand up to a bully” — he meant Mr. Trump — even at the risk of being fired.
The C.D.C. was forced, over the serious objections of its own scientists, to post coronavirus testing guidelines that suggested asymptomatic people should not be tested. (Dr. Redfield later walked that back after the resulting uproar, and it was ultimately reversed.) And the White House thwarted a plan, laid out in a directive drafted last month by Dr. Redfield, to require individuals to wear masks on all commercial transportation in the United States.
Supporters of the agency fear the C.D.C.’s reputation will be irrevocably damaged if Dr. Redfield does not start more vigorously defending its science.
“What has happened at C.D.C. has been horrifying to see,” said Dr. Mark Rosenberg, who pioneered public health research into gun violence at the C.D.C. but was pushed out after Republicans in Congress effectively cut off funding for his work. “It’s been terribly demoralizing to people who have been working 16 and 17 hour days for weeks or months at a time while taking on Covid-19.”
“We’ve all learned a terrible lesson,” said one C.D.C. official who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of being fired. “As much as we want to believe we can operate independently of politics and it’s all about the science, it took just a few months to hobble our ability to steer the course of this pandemic. So we can pretend that the politics don’t matter, but we have been kneecapped.”
Political appointees of the president meddled in the agency’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports, regarded as the “holiest of the holy” in medical literature. Equally troubling, agency officials say, is that the White House has muzzled the C.D.C., refusing to allow the nation’s leading public health experts to talk directly and regularly to the American people — a critical component of any successful infectious disease response.
I think the main takeoff point is that our CDC has, by most accounts, been the world standard in public health, and now, thanks to Trump's disdain for science and facts he deems as inconvenient to him, we are in danger of losing that, perhaps irrevocably.Most current and former C.D.C. officials acknowledge that Dr. Redfield is in a terrible position, working for a president who has declared all-out war on his agency and who regards its scientists as members of a so-called deep state out to get him. Unlike Dr. Fauci, he is a political appointee and lacks Civil Service protections. And unlike the F.D.A. commissioner, he cannot turn to a powerful industry constituency like pharmaceuticals to back him up.
Some say it would be unwise for him to step down, for fear of his successor.
“What happens if 50 of the top scientists at C.D.C. say, ‘We’ve had it, we’re leaving?’ Does that leave the country better off or worse off?” asked Dr. Jeffrey Koplan, who served as the C.D.C. director under Presidents Bill Clinton and George with. Bush and regularly met Dr. Redfield for lunch before the pandemic. “I suspect that Dr. Redfield is asking himself the same question.”
When he arrived at the C.D.C., one scientist there said, many in the agency were relieved. They had feared Mr. Trump might appoint someone openly hostile to science, or an opponent of vaccines. But Dr. Redfield had no experience in public health or in running a large government agency like the C.D.C., with 11,000 employees. Nor is he an especially good communicator.
“I don’t think he was the leader for this agency at this point in time,” said Dr. Georges C. Benjamin, the executive director of the American Public Health Association, who has known Dr. Redfield since they served together in the Army decades ago. “I don’t know if anybody could have been.”
Now, less than a month from the election, the question is whether the C.D.C. can recover. Dr. Foege refused to allow the possibility that it could not.
“They have to recover,” he said. “The world needs a gold standard in public health.”
