No. of Recommendations: 2
Who is Robert Redfield?
I didn’t have a clue, so I looked him up on Wikipedia And found myself innundated by extreme editing from both sides of the political divide.
Who is Robert Redfield?
I haven’t a friggin clue:
Army medical service
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Redfield's medical residency was at Walter Reed Army Medical Center (WRAMC) in Washington, D.C., where he completed his postgraduate medical training and internships in internal medicine (1978–1980), as a U.S. Army officer. Redfield completed clinical and research fellowships at WRAMC, in infectious diseases and tropical medicine, by 1982.[4]
Redfield continued as a U.S. Army physician and medical researcher at the WRAMC for the next decade, working in virology, immunology and clinical research. He collaborated with teams at the forefront of AIDS research, publishing several papers and advocating for strategies to translate knowledge gained from clinical studies to the practical treatment of patients afflicted by chronic viral diseases.[third-party source needed][4][verification needed]
Redfield retired from the Army in 1996 as a colonel.[7]
University of Maryland School of Medicine
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In 1996, Redfield, his HIV research colleague Robert Gallo and viral epidemiologist William Blattner co-founded the Institute of Human Virology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. It is a multidisciplinary research organization dedicated to developing research and treatment programs for chronic human viral infection and disease.[3] : 417
At the University of Maryland School of Medicine, Redfield served as a tenured professor of medicine and microbiology,[when?] chief of infectious disease,[when?] and vice chair of medicine.[when?][3] Redfield is known for his contributions in this period — in clinical research, in particular, for research into the virology and therapeutic treatments of HIV infection and AIDS. In the early years of investigations into the AIDS pandemic in the 1980s, Redfield led research that demonstrated that the HIV retrovirus could be heterosexually transmitted.[third-party source needed][3][4][8][9] He also developed the staging system now in use worldwide for the clinical assessment of HIV infection.[3][4] Under his clinical leadership at the University of Maryland the patient base grew from 200 patients to approximately 6,000 in Baltimore and Washington, D.C., and more than 1.3 million in African and Caribbean nations.[10] His clinical research team won over $600 million in research funding.[11] While holding this position, he was interviewed for the 2009 HIV/AIDS denialist film House of Numbers.[12] Scientists interviewed for the film complained afterward that their comments had been taken out of context and misrepresented, and that, unknown at the interview times, the film promoted pseudoscience.[13][14]
Advisory positions
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Redfield served as a member of the President's Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS from 2005 to 2009,[citation needed] and was appointed as chair of the International Subcommittee from 2006 to 2009.[citation needed] He is a past member of the Office of AIDS Research Advisory Council at the National Institutes of Health,[citation needed] the Fogarty International Center Advisory Board at the National Institutes of Health,[citation needed] and the Advisory Anti-Infective Agent Committee of the Food and Drug Administration.[citation needed]
CDC leadership
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Redfield speaks on the COVID-19 pandemic in January 2020
Redfield became the Director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on March 26, 2018.[15] He was appointed to the post by President Donald Trump, after the president's first appointee, Brenda Fitzgerald, resigned in scandal.[16] His appointment was considered controversial; he was publicly opposed by the Center for Science in the Public Interest and Patty Murray, the ranking Democrat on the Senate health committee, but supported by Kathleen Kennedy Townsend and some advocates for AIDS patients.[17][18][19][20] In his inaugural address to the CDC, Redfield called the agency "science-based and data-driven, and that's why CDC has the credibility around the world that it has".[15]
COVID-19
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See also: COVID-19 pandemic in the United States
On January 8, 2020, Redfield was advised by the head of China's Center for Disease Control and Prevention that SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19) was probably contagious among humans. Redfield did not warn the public at that time.[21] The first confirmed case of COVID-19 was discovered in the U.S. on January 20, 2020,[22] while Redfield was serving as director of the CDC. Redfield was a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force from its start on January 29, 2020.[23]
On February 13, 2020, Redfield said that the "virus is probably with us beyond this season, beyond this year, and I think eventually the virus will find a foothold and we will get community-based transmission".[24] This contrasted with statements by President Trump, who, erroneously, told the public through most of February that the virus was under control.[25]
During February 2020, the CDC's early coronavirus test malfunctioned nationwide. Redfield reassured his fellow task force officials that the problem would be quickly solved, according to White House officials.[26] It took about three weeks to sort out the failed test kits, which may have been contaminated during their processing in a CDC lab. Widespread COVID-19 testing in the United States was effectively stalled until February 28, when the faulty test was revised, and the days afterward, when the Food and Drug Administration began loosening rules that had restricted other labs from developing tests.[27] Later investigations by the Food and Drug Administration and the Department of Health and Human Services found that the CDC had violated its own protocols in developing the faulty test.[26][28]
Redfield testified to Congress on March 2, 2020, about the outbreak of COVID-19 in the U.S. Given the lack of testing on patients and healthcare workers requesting testing, Florida Democrat Debbie Wasserman Schultz asked Redfield about who was responsible to ensure testing could be performed on individuals who needed to be tested. Redfield could not name a specific individual and looked to Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of infectious disease at the NIH, who said, "The system is not geared to what we need right now... that is a failing."[29][30]
On July 14, 2020, Redfield warned that the winter of 2020–2021 would probably be "one of the most difficult times that we've experienced in American public health".[31] He also said, "If we could get everybody to wear a mask right now, I really do think over the next four, six, eight weeks, we could bring this epidemic under control."[32] Trump, asked about Redfield's statements, said he opposed a mask law and said "masks cause problems too," but also said, "I think masks are good".[33]
On July 23, the CDC called for reopening American schools, in a statement written by a working group at the White House that included Redfield but had minimal representation from other CDC officials.[34]
Trump publicly contradicted Redfield on September 16, 2020, on the timeline for a COVID-19 vaccine and the effectiveness of masks compared with inoculation. Redfield told a Senate panel that a limited supply of a COVID-19 vaccine might be available in November or December, but that the general public would not be inoculated until the summer or fall of 2021.[35] Redfield also said that masks could be a more effective protection against COVID-19 than the vaccine. After Redfield's testimony, Trump told reporters, "I believe he was confused" and said a vaccine could be available in weeks and go "immediately" to the general public.[36][37]
In September 2020, Redfield sought to extend a no-sail order on passenger cruise ships into 2021 to prevent the spread of COVID-19, but he was overruled by Vice President Mike Pence. The no-sail order was instead set to expire on October 31, 2020. Some of the severest early outbreaks of COVID-19 were on cruise ships.[38]
In a March 26, 2021, Redfield said that in his opinion the most likely cause of the COVID-19 pandemic was a laboratory escape of SARS-CoV-2, which "doesn't imply any intentionality", and that as a virologist, he did not believe it made "biological sense" for the virus to be so "efficient in human to human transmission" from the early outbreak.[39]
In the political reappraisal of the pandemic, Redfield was heard on March 8, 2023, during a congressional hearing regarding the origins of COVID-19. Redfield reaffirmed his conclusion that the pandemic was caused by a leak from a laboratory (lab leak hypothesis). This conclusion was based primarily on the biology of the virus itself, including its rapid high contagiousness in human-to-human transmission. He stated that the virus was too capable of spreading between humans to be the result of a natural animal-to-human spillover (zoonotic hypothesis).[40][41]
Redfield stated that the biology of the virus, including its high infectivity in human-to-human transmission, suggests that it originated in a laboratory through gain-of-function research, in which scientists attempt to increase the transmissibility or pathogenicity. Redfield testified that gain-of-function research on high-risk viruses in Wuhan have been funded by National Institutes of Health, the State Department, USAID and the Department of Defense (DOD). The House of Representatives voted unanimously in favor of a bill mandating the release of information on the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.[42]
Assessments
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The CDC's actions during the pandemic have led to intense scrutiny of Redfield in congressional hearings and in media reports.[43] Laurie Garrett, a science journalist who is a former senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, called Redfield "about the worst person you could think of to be heading the CDC at this time" and said "he lets his prejudices interfere with the science, which you cannot afford during a pandemic".[44] William Schaffner, an infectious-disease specialist at Vanderbilt University, said "Bob Redfield's commitment to public health is completely strong," but said that Redfield has had trouble advocating effectively inside the White House.[45] Trump was said to like Redfield but to distrust the CDC
So who is Robert Redfield andcan he be trusted?
Honestly, I still don’t have a clue.
The obvious weaknesses of Wikipedia are evident in this quote.
