Medical workers test a resident at a drive-through COVID-19 testing site. Photographer: Eve Edelheit/Bloomberg
The CDC encouraged other authorities, including the Food and Drug Administration, to allow hospitals and commercial labs to get tests on the market faster. But ensuring that America had widespread testing capacity for the novel pathogen ultimately was not the CDC’s job, Redfield said.
“It was really the responsibility of the private sector and the clinical medicine apparatus to develop these tests for clinical medicine,” he said. “That’s the part that’s still frustrating some people.”
Other parts of government share responsibility. It took weeks for the FDA to begin issuing emergency authorizations for other tests, after problems with the CDC kits emerged, for example. But the errors cost crucial time, said Topol.
“The singular egregious failure was the lack of having a test ready, at scale, with all that was happening in China,” said Topol. “It was their job to be ready for the worst-case scenario. Ready to do millions of tests throughout the country. Because that didn’t occur, everything that has happened since then is attributable to that failure.’’
Redfield maintains that that’s a misunderstanding of the agency’s responsibilities, and predicted the CDC would come out of the pandemic stronger. “Our public-health capacity for decades to come is going to be strengthened, the core capabilities are going to be finally brought to where they need to be,” he said. “We’re going to have laboratory capacity that has enormous redundancy.”
Where’s the CDC?
Redfield, 68, is a devout Catholic and a noted virologist who has done extensive research and clinical work on HIV and AIDs. He served for 20 years in the U.S. Army Medical Corps, and after his retirement founded the Institute of Human Virology at the University of Maryland with two other renowned HIV researchers. He’s led the CDC for two years, taking over from President Donald Trump’s first director, Brenda Fitzgerald, who resigned from the agency after buying stock in a tobacco company shortly after taking the job.
While Redfield has never had a reputation for seeking the spotlight, the CDC’s public presence looks far different than when the outbreak began. Through early March, its experts held regular briefings to educate the public on the virus and the government’s attempts to contain it. In recent weeks, Trump has taken on responsibility for briefing the public himself, with a rotating cast of officials that rarely includes the CDC, but often includes a mix of conflicting scientific claims and medical advice put forth by the president that are then gently walked back by other members of government.
Redfield was a regular presence at the government’s briefings early on. But as the White House and Trump have taken over, he’s receded. Since March 14, according to an analysis of transcripts, he’s appeared only four times at the Trump-led White House briefings that are broadcast across the U.S. and serve as the administration’s most visible and best-covered message to the public about the virus. Most days, no one from the CDC appears at the briefings at all.
The CDC’s last public briefing of its own took place over a month ago, on March 9. Asked where the decision to end the agency’s briefings had come from, Redfield said he didn’t know. “I just know that our regular briefing was discontinued,” he said.
A Trump administration official said Redfield attends task force meetings by phone when he’s in Atlanta and in person when in Washington. The official said the White House briefings cover much of the same material that CDC briefings did, so it doesn’t make sense to hold both. The official said he did not know who decided to discontinue the CDC’s own briefings.