Controversial History with HIV Disqualifies Robert Redfield from CDC Service

Guest Blog By: Marcus J. Hopkins, Blogger

Robert Redfield, a 66-year-old virologist and physician, has been appointed to be the head of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) by U.S. Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Alex Azar (Sun, 2018b).  Redfield has replaced the acting head of the CDC, Principal Deputy Director Anne Schuchat, after the Trump Administration’s first pick, Brenda Fitzgerald, was forced to resign because she failed to divest from her “complex financial interests” “…in a definitive time period” (Sun, 2018).

Fitzgerald’s financial interests were so “complex” that she was essentially permanently recused from participating in the agencies activities and was unable to testify before Congress on public health issues.  Appointed by Trump’s first HHS Secretary, the disgraced Tom Price, Fitzgerald repeatedly dismissed concerns about her financial interests, and yet, had to cancel each appearance before Congress because of said interests.

Under Azar, Redfield is yet another controversial pick to head up the nation’s primary health organization.  Redfield has a long and storied history of controversial positions related to HIV and public health.

Photo Source: Gay Today

Beginning with his tenure within the Defense Department, Redfield helped create a disastrous and non-confidential policy of testing all troops for HIV beginning in October 1985 (Garrett, 2018).  Troops who tested Positive for HIV often found out after their entire chain of command, and anyone found to be HIV+ was immediately barred from service.  In addition, Active Duty personnel were also tested, and if found Positive, were often subjected to mistreatment, including isolating HIV+ personnel in isolated barracks colloquially referred to as “the leper colony,” where they were treated like prisoners until they fully developed AIDS or were dishonorably discharged.  By 1989, 5 million troops were tested, and roughly 6,000 testing Positive (Garrett). 

In the 1990s, Redfield was yet again embroiled in HIV chicanery when internal memos were obtained by Public Citizen, a left-leaning non-profit organization that represents patients, citizens, and consumer rights through advocacy and policy research.  These previously unrelease memoranda demonstrated clear evidence that Redfield led a: 

…systematic pattern of data manipulation, inappropriate statistical analyses, and misleading data presentation by Army researchers in an apparent attempt to promote the usefulness of the GP160 AIDS vaccine…which [was] intended to prevent the progression of disease in persons with HIV infection (Public Citizen, 1994).

In Phases I and II studies, researchers at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, led by then-Chief of the Department of Retroviral Research, Robert Redfield, and were published in many scientific fora (plural for “forum”), including the New England Journal of Medicine, AIDS Research and Human Retroviruses, and at the International AIDS Conference in 1992.  The fabricated results were also twice falsely presented before hearings of the House Subcommittee on Health and Environment.

This repeated demonstration of a lack of ethics, moral fortitude, and integrity make him clearly unfit to head that nation’s leading health organization.  Dr. Peter Lurie, President of the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), goes further in his full-throated opposition to Redfield, stating that, as the head of the CDC, we would get “…a sloppy scientist with a long history of scientific misconduct and an extreme religious agenda” (Lurie, 2018).  We at ADAP Advocacy Association could not agree more with this assessment.

The Trump Administration has repeatedly displayed a unprecedented lack of integrity on several front, but perhaps its worst offenses exist with its appointments – Betsy DeVos, Scott Pruitt, Mick Mulvaney, Tom Price, Mike Pompeo, Rex Tillerson and Ryan Zinke.  Each of these appointments stands on their own in terms of their unpreparedness, lack of candor, and incompetence within their positions, rife with conflicts of interest, unacceptable levels of spending on personal travel and completely unnecessary “security upgrades,” and serving not the interests of the American public, but either the interests of corporations who have long derided the wings of government they now lead, or their own.  Robert Redfield is just the latest example of this failure to understand either the complexities of the positions to which they are appointed, or the roles of this organizations in American governance.

Enough is enough.  Redfield must, as his predecessor before him, be flushed out of the CDC before we become the laughing stock of the world.

References:

• Garrett, L. (2018, March 23). Meet Trump’s New, Homophobic Public Health Quack. Washington, DC: Foreign Policy. Retrieved from: http://foreignpolicy.com/2018/03/23/meet-trumps-new-homophobic-public-health-quack/
• Lurie, P. (2018, March 21). CSPI Urges Administration Not to Appoint Dr. Robert Redfield, with History of Scientific Misconduct, as CDC Director. Washington, DC: Center for Science in the Public Interest: News. Retrived from: https://cspinet.org/news/cspi-urges-administration-not-appoint-dr-robert-redfield-history-scientific-misconduct-cdc
• Public Citizen. (1994, June 07). Washington, DC: Public Citizen. Retrieved from: https://kaiserhealthnews.files.wordpress.com/2018/03/940607plswtowaxman.pdf
• Sun, L.H. (2018a, January 31). CDC director resigns because of conflicts over financial interests. Washington, DC: The Washington Post: News: To Your Health. Retrieved from: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2018/01/31/cdc-director-resigns-because-of-conflicts-over-financial-interests/?utm_term=.24ab7b89a316 
• Sun, L.H. (2018b, March 21). Longtime AIDS researcher Robert Redfield picked to lead CDC. Washington, DC: The Washington Post: News: To Your Health. Retrieved from: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2018/03/21/longtime-aids-researcher-robert-redfield-picked-to-lead-cdc/?utm_term=.3a5d8f592e61

Disclaimer: Guest blogs do not necessarily reflect the views of the ADAP Advocacy Association, but rather they provide a neutral platform whereby the author serves to promote open, honest discussion about public health-related issues and updates.