CDC's Redfield in the hot seat as White House looks for someone to blame

[RandySF]

(CNN)A day after President Donald Trump privately excoriated the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to Republican senators during a lunch on Capitol Hill, the fate of the agency's director, Dr. Robert Redfield, is in question.

Trump did not bring up or single out Redfield during his lunch with GOP senators, multiple sources familiar with the discussion told CNN. The director was also at the White House on Monday for a meeting.

As recently as last week, Redfield told colleagues he didn't think he was in trouble or that his job was on the line. According to a senior administration official, Redfield expressed confidence that the current tension with White House coronavirus task force coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx, who Redfield has a decades long relationship with, was fleeting.

Over the weekend, the momentum appeared to have shifted. Redfield grew concerned he may have a target on his back, according to a source familiar with the dynamic. CDC officials dismissed the claims that Redfield was in the hot seat.




https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/20/politics/robert-redfield-trump-cdc-testing/index.html

[hatrack]

1. You mean Dr. "I Serve On A Board Of A Gay-Bashing Hard-Right AIDS Group" Redfield?

That asshole?

EDIT

The front-line agency built to respond to a pandemic, the CDC, was placed in unreliable hands. Dr. Robert Redfield is a right-wing darling with a checkered scientific past. His 2018 nomination 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.

Redfield’s tight-knit relationship with the Smiths goes back at least three decades, beginning when Shepherd Smith recruited him to join the board of his religious nonprofit, Americans for a Sound AIDS/HIV Policy (ASAP). The Smiths made their views plain in the 1990 book Christians in the Age of AIDS, which argued HIV infection resulted from “people’s sinfulness,” and described AIDS as a consequence for those who “violate God’s laws.” Redfield, a devout Catholic who was then a prominent HIV researcher in the Army, wrote the introduction, calling for the rejection of “false prophets who preach the quick-fix strategies of condoms and free needles.”

Redfield was a rising star at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, whose name had been floated as a candidate for surgeon general. But the late 1980s were benighted times in the AIDS epidemic, and 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,” remembers Laurie Garrett, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Coming Plague, who reported on Redfield’s actions. “It was the opposite of compassion.”

Redfield’s Army career derailed after he was accused of “sloppy or, possibly, deceptive” research for touting a trial HIV therapy that later proved useless. 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.

EDIT

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/covid-19-test-trump-admin-failed-disaster-995930/

[ZZenith]

3. Birx came through Walter Reed as well.

Something very shady about these “AIDS researchers” that I can’t quite put my finger on.

[Vogon_Glory]

6. If Doc Redfield is in the hot seat, GOOD!

I read the Rolling Stone article, too. If true, Redfield is one of the four people most responsible for this mal-administration’s disastrously bungled response time the Corona virus pandemic.

If he loses his job because Donnie needs a scapegoat and ihis reputation suffers for it, serves him right!

[Hoyt]

2. trump's handpicked man won't get any sympathy from me.

[tanyev]

4. Loyalty is a one way street for Donald Trump, and all roads lead to him.

[Andy823]

5. Well one thing for sure

trumps going to blame "EVERYONE"he can because he sure as hell won't take the blame he deserves! A narcissist who is losing control of his surroundings has to lash out, just like trump is doing. It will only get worse.

He will take the whole Republican Party down with him.