This explains the CDC cuts, some of the incompetence and delays, plus why Redfield tends to let Anthony Fauci correct Trump’s lies.
Laurie Garrett, a former senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, noted in an op-ed for CNN at the time that “Redfield's early engagement with the AIDS epidemic in the US in the 1980s and 90s was controversial.”
Garrett explained: “As an Army major at Walter Reed Medical Institute, he designed policies for controlling the disease within the US military that involved placing infected personnel in quarantine and investigating their pasts to identify and track possible sexual partners. Soldiers were routinely discharged and left to die of AIDS, humiliated and jobless, often abandoned by their families.”
Redfield also worked closely with the Christian organization Americans for a Sound AIDS/HIV Policy (ASAP) in the 1980s, she noted — a group which “maintained that AIDS was ‘God's judgment’ against homosexuals, spread in an America weakened by single-parent households and loss of family values.”
In his 1990 book, "Christians in the Age of AIDS," Redfield and his co-author W. Shepherd Smith, Jr. — who headed ASAP — “denounced distribution of sterile needles to drug users and condoms to sexually active adults, and described anti-discrimination programs as the efforts of ‘false prophets,’” Garrett wrote.
A couple of years later, Redfield and ASAP supported a House bill that would have subjected HIV positive individuals to “testing, loss of professional licenses and would have effectively quarantined them.”
https://t.co/OVeDbNCulL
First, he has no experience running a public health agency, and does not have the all-important relationships with state and local public health officials such experience would bring.
Second, based on work I conducted with Sidney Wolfe at Public Citizen in the mid-1990s, 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: mandatory HIV testing, reporting of positive HIV results to public health authorities without the patient’s consent, and quarantining of HIV-positive individuals in the military.
cspinet.org/...