Dr. Robert Redfield, CDC Director and Top HIV Vaccine Researcher

Some of my earliest posts mentioned how the CDC botched testing in the pandemic. We’ll look at the history of the current CDC director, Dr. Robert Redfield, before resuming that discussion.

Both of Redfield’s parents were scientists working at the National Institutes of Health. Graduating from Georgetown University School of Medicine, he did his medical residency at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington D.C.   

VaxSyn, the AIDS Vaccine

It is surrounding an AIDS vaccine, named VaxSyn, that Redfield’s career has the most controversy. Redfield was working with a private company, MicroGeneSys, in the development of this. He presented data regarding 15 of the 26 patients at an international AIDS conference saying it showed promise.

He stated he didn’t have the other data and so presented what he had available. A different scientist, Maryanne Vahey, said he had all the data.

The Defense Department investigated Redfield as he was accused of misrepresenting this data regarding the vaccine’s efficacy. In 1993 the investigation concluded that Redfield had not committed scientific misconduct but was controversial in doing so. “[S]everal of Redfield’s colleague claim the investigation failed to resolve some of the issues that triggered the inquiry.” https://science.sciencemag.org/content/261/5123/824

The final investigatory report was never released, meaning we can’t know how the conclusions were reached. Though the watchdog group Public Citizen did obtain some of the documents stating, “Col. Dangerfield’s investigation lends new meaning to the term ‘whitewash.’ Massive parts of the testimony of key figures have been whited out in documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act”. https://khn.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2018/03/940607plswtowaxman.pdf

Former Air Force Lt. Col. Craig Hendrix, now a doctor and director at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine stated. “Either he was egregiously sloppy with data or it was fabricated. It was somewhere on that spectrum, both of which were serious and raised questions about his trustworthiness.” https://www.cbsnews.com/news/aids-researcher-robert-r-redford-selected-as-cdc-director/

Despite absolving him of scientific fraud, the investigation still blasted him for having a “close relationship” with a conservative Christian group, called Americans for a Sound HIV/AIDS Policy (ASAP), sharing scientific information “to a degree that is inappropriate.”

Yet the vaccine research went on, Redfield still pushing it forward. The FDA “was less than impressed with the product and declined to approve continued human testing. Unfazed, MicroGeneSys recruited former Sen. Russell Long to lobby fellow Republicans with the hope of getting Congress to back further testing. In House hearings, Redfield insisted that VaxSyn was within 12 months of being ready for a large-scale human test that would prove the gp160 concoction could stop the disease process. With Smith and ASAP chiming in, Congress was bowled over and approved $20 million for further human experiments. Also in the chorus of VaxSyn backers was then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney.” https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/03/23/meet-trumps-new-homophobic-public-health-quack/

Apparently, Dr. Anthony Fauci was involved in the panel that evaluated the appropriation! https://science.sciencemag.org/content/263/5146/463.2

Despite more research, including a phase II trial, the vaccine was never found effective. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10720508/

Also involved in this research is Dr. Deborah Birx, who was at one time Redfield’s assistant. Brix has recently been in the spotlight with the coronavirus pandemic as White House Task Force Chair. Perhaps a deep dive on her later.

Interestingly, Redfield was also considered for CDC Director back in 2002, but these events were deemed too controversial for Bush to appoint him. (Instead we got Julie Gerberding.) https://www.ph.ucla.edu/epi/bioter/cdcdirectorchoices.html

Redfield’s Religious Ties – ASAP and CAFI

As mentioned, some of the controversy surrounded Redfield is due to his religious ties and beliefs.

In a forward to Christians in the Age of AIDS, Redfield wrote: “It is time to reject the temptation of denial of the AIDS/HIV crisis; to reject false prophets who preach the quick-fix strategies of condoms and free needles; to reject those who preach prejudice; and to reject those who try to replace God as judge.” https://www.cbsnews.com/news/aids-researcher-robert-r-redford-selected-as-cdc-director/

ASAP later became the Children’s AIDS Fund (CAF). Redfield was serving as a board member here when he was appointed CDC director, though he resigned from the board when taking the CDC director position. https://web.archive.org/web/20180330114408/https://childrensaidsfund.org/accountability/

This group has continually come under fire for anti-gay and anti-HIV activities.

This piece may seem irrelevant and confusing but read it and then the following section to find out why I included it.

“In June 2014, CAF Uganda received $1.5 million as part of a multiyear HIV/AIDS treatment and prevention program. That brings the total CAF Uganda has received since the start of Obama’s second term to at least $6.6 million. This direct funding isn’t CAF’s only source of federal money. The organization is also a sub-grantee of Catholic Relief Services via the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Response, or PEPFAR, in Zambia. According to Catholic Relief Services’ most recent tax returns, from 2011–12, that subgrant amounted to $2.1 million.” https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/anti-gay-anti-choice-childrens-aids-fund-still-raking-taxpayer-money/

AIDS is Big Money

After retiring from the army in 1996, he co-founded the Institute of Human Virology along with fellow HIV researchers Robert Gallo and William Blattner. “His institute has worked on AIDS in Africa, getting $138 million from CDC for its work.” https://www.cbsnews.com/news/aids-researcher-robert-r-redford-selected-as-cdc-director/

“Gallo, who once claimed to have discovered HIV, lost that moniker after years of dispute with French researchers, two of whom were awarded the Nobel Prize. During the Bush administration, which rolled out the enormous President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) in 2003, the Gallo group enjoyed strong funding support.” https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/03/23/meet-trumps-new-homophobic-public-health-quack/

Lots of money moves around regarding AIDS. Just to give a glimpse of this here’s some funding details provided by Wikipedia to Redfield and Gallo.

“In July 2007, Gallo and his team were awarded a $15 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for research into a preventive vaccine for HIV/AIDS. Additionally, in 2011 Gallo and his team received $23.4 million from a consortium of funding sources to support the next phase of research into the Institute of Human Virology’s (IHV) promising HIV/AIDS preventive vaccine candidate. The IHV vaccine program grants included $16.8 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, $2.2 million from the U.S. Army’s Military HIV Research Program (MHRP), and other research funding from a variety of sources including the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH).” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Gallo

Understand that disease is big business. Again, it doesn’t mean that all people involved have nefarious aims. Far from it. But with this much money moving around, conflicts of interest must be investigated.

In addition, Redfield served as a member of the President’s Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS from 2005 to 2009, including chair of the International Subcommittee.

Appointment to CDC Director

Redfield became the director in March 2018, after taking the position from Brenda Fitzgerald.

Peter Lurie, president of the Center for Science in the Public Interest released a statement prior to Redfield’s appointment to the CDC. “This appointment would be disastrous for at least three reasons.  First, he has no experience running a public health agency… Second…he has been credibly accused of scientific misconduct for exaggerating the benefits of a putative HIV vaccine, for which he was investigated by the military. Third, he has supported a variety of policies related to HIV/AIDS that are anathema to the great majority of public health professionals…What one wants in a director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is a scientist of impeccable scientific integrity.  What one would get in Robert Redfield is a sloppy scientist with a long history of scientific misconduct and an extreme religious agenda. We urge the administration not to appoint Dr. Redfield.” https://cspinet.org/news/cspi-urges-administration-not-appoint-dr-robert-redfield-history-scientific-misconduct-cdc

There was also controversy regarding his salary at the CDC. Originally, $375,000 annually, which is very high for a government scientist position, he agreed to lower it to $209,700.

What is most interesting about this is how much he was making earlier. Redfield’s “pay last year during a 15-month period at the University of Maryland topped $827,000, with his base salary of $650,000 plus bonuses and consulting fees, according to The Wall Street Journal… It is very hard to understand what accomplishments prompted the University of Maryland to consider Redfield worth $827,000 for 15 months.” https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/13/opinions/trumps-terrible-choice-for-cdc-redfield-garrett/index.html

This is much larger than the $131,780 listed here for professors at the University of Maryland. Why and how was he making so much? https://data.chronicle.com/category/state/Maryland/faculty-salaries/

CDC and Coronavirus Response

So it is with all this background information that we look at new information on the CDC’s handling of the pandemic.

Early testing in specific areas could have been helpful in containing the spread or at the very least provide more complete statistics from which to base models off of. The CDC worked to develop their own test of which extremely limited quantities were shipped out around the country. Furthermore, this test proved inaccurate.

“The silence from CDC . . . is deafening,” Joanne Bartkus, the Minnesota health department’s lab director, wrote on February 10^th. https://www.chron.com/news/article/Inside-the-coronavirus-testing-failure-Alarm-and-15178203.php

Meanwhile countries such as South Korea were conducting 1000 tests per day. There were a number of bureaucratic hurdles that further compounded such problems.

Eric Topol, founder and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute. “The singular egregious failure was the lack of having a test ready, at scale, with all that was happening in China. 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.” https://www.stripes.com/news/us/what-happened-to-the-cdc-1.625618/cdc-1.625619

Publicly obtained email correspondence from CDC and other public health officials shows the issues. “What comes through clearly is confusion, as the CDC underestimated the threat from the virus and stumbled in communicating to local public health officials what should be done.” https://www.propublica.org/article/internal-emails-show-how-chaos-at-the-cdc-slowed-the-early-response-to-coronavirus

Despite this, Redfield was confident and optimistic. On January 28^th, he wrote, “While we believe the 2019 -nCoV poses a very serious public health threat, the virus is not spreading in the U.S. at this time and CDC believes the immediate health risk from 2019-nCoV to the general American public is low…CDC’s goal is to assure an effective response to this emerging infectious disease.”

On March 3^rd he wrote, “We anticipated and prepared for the possible spread of COVID-19 in communities across the United States…Confronting global outbreaks and protecting Americans is what we do.” https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6818456-Redfield-March-3-Email.html

The CDC website points to a National Vital Statistics System document that says, “COVID-19 should be reported on the death certificate for all decedents where the disease caused or is assumed to have caused or contributed to death.” https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvss/coronavirus/Alert-2-New-ICD-code-introduced-for-COVID-19-deaths.pdf

I don’t know about you but making assumptions about causes of death means the numbers will be off. A Minnesota doctor agreed. Dr. Scott Jensen said this was “ridiculous”. He also called into question that Medicare payments could incentivize poor treatment options. “Right now Medicare has determined that if you have a COVID-19 admission to the hospital you’ll get paid $13,000. If that COVID-19 patient goes on a ventilator, you get $39,000; three times as much. Nobody can tell me, after 35 years in the world of medicine, that sometimes those kinds of things [have] impact on what we do.” https://www.foxnews.com/media/physician-blasts-cdc-coronavirus-death-count-guidelines

But, of course, the methods deployed are being given credit for the numbers lower than the models predicted. “If we just social distance, we will see this virus and this outbreak basically decline, decline, decline. And I think that’s what you’re seeing,” said Redfield in an interview. “I think you’re going to see the numbers are, in fact, going to be much less than what would have been predicted by the models.” https://abcnews.go.com/Health/cdc-director-downplays-coronavirus-models-death-toll-lower/story?id=70011918&cid=clicksource_4380645_4_heads_hero_live_hero_hed

Negligent or Criminal?

Remember what Former Air Force Lt. Col. Craig Hendrix, said regarding the AIDS vaccine? “Either he was egregiously sloppy with data or it was fabricated. It was somewhere on that spectrum, both of which were serious and raised questions about his trustworthiness.”

In this case I would say that either the CDC, with Redfield at the helm, was either extremely negligent in how they handled this pandemic, or they were purposefully and criminally culpable. It is somewhere on that spectrum.

Towards the second possibility there I provide the following. Some are saying that the novel coronavirus has been here longer than has been stated.

“It is clear from the CDC data that a number of states in the country experienced an onslaught of [Influenza like illness] beginning in November of 2019, much earlier and much more substantive than the four previous years…The implications of this are many. If many more people than originally thought have already had this virus, and survived, it means that Americans in those areas are likely able to return to normal life. It gives us a broader data set to look at in terms of fatality, length of illness, treatment measures, etc. It also showcases the need for antibody testing to begin in rapid fashion, and begs the question “Why doesn’t the CDC already know this?” UncoverDC used their data.” https://uncoverdc.com/2020/04/05/could-cdc-data-prove-covid-19-infections-in-november-2019/

This is interesting information. You can watch this play out week by week on the CDC’s website here. Notice that the map is almost completely red well before any social distancing began. https://gis.cdc.gov/grasp/fluview/main.html

More deep dives on the other players to come…