May 18th 2020

Bill Berkowitz

Dr. Robert Redfield, the man with the chin-strap beard that we saw hanging with President Trump during those early awkward coronavirus press briefings, was a favorite of Christian conservatives when in March 2018, he was appointed director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC); a post that does not require Senate approval. For decades, the CDC has been recognized as an international leader in fighting potential pandemics including H1NI, MERS, and Ebola. However now, under Redfield’s leadership and during the worst pandemic in a hundred years, the CDC has been largely either unresponsive or bumbling in tackling the early phases of the coronavirus.  Clear direction has been replaced by inconsistent or absent guidance, phony optimism and an abysmal failure in ramping up testing and contact tracing—the core initial response to contain any infectious disease. 

Dr. Redfield’s career has been marked by some public health successes, including helping to design plans to fight HIV and opioids in the U.S., as well as controversy.  But most disturbing at this critical point is that Redfield (and thus his agency) has been caught in the vortex of Trump sycophancy – tiptoeing around the president’s lies and distortions, while working with other federal agencies, the States and the medical community to provide credible science-guided technical and planning support. As Trump careens towards reopening the country—damn the pandemic--it is unclear if Redfield can provide the credible science-guided leadership that will be critical to preventing a second resurgence with many more deaths in the fall.  

During a February 29 press briefing with Trump, Redfield, a member of the president’s coronavirus task force, assured the American people that “The risk at this time is low.” Redfield added: “The American public needs to go on with their normal lives.” According to Rolling Stone’s Tim Dickinson, “Even as he spoke, Redfield knew the country should be taking a different course. The Coronavirus Task Force had resolved to present the president with a plan for mitigation efforts, like school and business closures, on February 24th, but reportedly reversed course after Trump exploded about the economic fallout. Instead, the CDC director continued touting “aggressive containment” to Congress on February 27th.” 

On March 6th, standing next to Trump, who wore a red Keep America Great cap during the president’s visit to the CDC, Redfield said “I want to thank you for your decisive leadership, in helping us put public health first.” 

Senator Patty Murray of Washington state, and the ranking member of the Senate’s top health committee, has singled out Redfield for “dereliction of duty.” 

Whereas he once he stood smiling at the side of Trump, more recently, Redfield has recently become decidedly mire low-profile. According to the Associated Press, Redfield’s standing as a prominent advisor to the president took a hit last week when a CDC report spelling out step-by-step guidelines for local authorities on how, and when, to reopen restaurants and other public places during the current pandemic, was rebuffed and shelved by the White House. When pressed during Senate health committee testimony on May 12th, Redfield insisted that the CDC guidance was forthcoming but was wishy-washy as to when.

“The front-line agency built to respond to a pandemic, the CDC, was placed in unreliable hands,” Rolling Stone’s Dickinson recently wrote of Redfield in a story headlined “The Four Men Responsible For America’s COVID-19 Test Disaster.” For the religious right, however, Redfield was the right man for the job.  The man behind Redfield’s ascendance is Shepherd Smith (not the former Fox New broadcaster), a longtime, and relatively unknown, religious right activist.

Dickinson describes Redfield as “a right-wing darling with a checkered scientific past,” and his appointment “was a triumph for the Christian right, a coup in particular for evangelical activists Shepherd and Anita Smith, who have been instrumental in driving a global AIDS strategy centered on abstinence.”

In August 2018, Kaiser Health News’ Marisa Taylor reported that Smith “has spent more than three decades cultivating relationships with leading AIDS researchers and policymakers to promote abstinence-only sex education.” 

Shepherd and his wife Anita Smith’s 1990 book, Christians in the Age of AIDS, they argued that HIV resulted from “people’s sinfulness,” and those who contracted AIDS did so because they “violate God’s laws.” Rolling Stone’s Dickinson pointed out that “Redfield, a devout Catholic who was then a prominent HIV researcher in the Army, wrote the introduction to the book, calling for the rejection of ‘false prophets who preach the quick-fix strategies of condoms and free needles.’”

Apparently, Redfield was chosen to head the CDC at the urging of Smith. “Smith’s wife, who has had her own high-profile activism over the years,” Kaiser Health News’ Taylor pointed out “is working on abstinence efforts within the administration. Anita Smith was hired recently as a part-time PEPFAR consultant by one of the couple’s longtime allies.”

Paul Zeitz, an expert on global AIDS epidemic control who worked for the State Department from mid-2014 until last August 2017, said that “These are the people who are likely to be influencing how we spend taxpayer money on AIDS efforts for the rest of the administration.”

“In the late 1980s, Smith developed relationships with government scientists even as other religious leaders balked at the idea of getting involved in AIDS prevention efforts,” Taylor wrote. “That included recruiting Redfield, at what was then Walter Reed Army Medical Center, to join the advisory board of the Smiths’ fledgling Americans for a Sound AIDS/HIV Policy. The now-defunct organization strongly supported abstinence education.”

For Smith, Redfield was an important recruit, having “also served as chairman and an advisory board member of another organization that Smith and his wife later founded. He stepped down from Children’s AIDS Fund International, which also backs abstinence education, only to comply with government ethics rules” after he joined the CDC in March 2018. When Redfield’s appointment was announced, Senator Murray warned of his “pattern of ethically and morally questionable behavior,” as well as his “lack of public-health expertise,” and urged Trump to “reconsider.” 

During the height of the AIDS epidemic in the late 1980s, “Redfield championed discriminatory policies that he defended as ‘good medicine’ — including quarantining of HIV-positive soldiers in a segregated barracks. These soldiers were routinely given dishonorable discharges after superiors rooted out evidence of homosexuality, and left to suffer the course of their devastating disease without health insurance. ‘It was dark,’ Laurie Garrett, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Coming Plague, told Dickinson. “It was the opposite of compassion.”

Redfield was accused of “’sloppy or, possibly, deceptive’ research for touting a trial HIV therapy that later proved useless,” Dickinson noted. “An investigation found no wrongdoing, but called out his ‘inappropriately close’ relationship with Shepherd Smith, who also hyped the drug. Redfield insisted there was ‘no basis for any of the allegations,’ but the scandal spurred his departure to a research lab at the University of Maryland.

None of these blunders stopped Redfield from regaining his footing and reemerging in the Trump administration: ”Over the years, there have been several attempts to push him into powerful slots within Republican administrations,”  said. Garrett. “I don’t think most of his promoters have ever been particularly interested in the science.”