Robert Redfield lamented how the CDC was sidelined under the Trump administration.- Excerpts from Redfield's private testimony were first released on Friday.
Former
"I've said this publicly before, this is one of my great disappointments. That HHS basically took over total clearance of briefings by CDC," Redfield testified before the House panel tasked with investigating the federal government's response to the pandemic.
Excerpts of Redfield's testimony were first released on Friday and were first reported by The Washington Post.
Redfield's testimony, as he himself alluded to, underscores the CDC's very obvious absence during key moments of the Trump administration's
Messonnier, of course, was proven right. The coronavirus pandemic has killed nearly 1 million Americans. But at the time, her comments contradicted the White House's public views and her concern sent the stock market tumbling. In response, Redfield testified that the CDC could not get approval from the Health and Human Services Department to hold its own
"So from where I sat, the ability to make those decisions internally at CDC were no longer CDC's decisions, whereas I would argue the clearance process prior to Nancy Messonnier's was more perfunctory, whatever we put up got cleared. And I assume we still had to get cleared, but I don't remember ever not being cleared until afterwards that I -- for a while, none of our briefings were approved," Redfield testified.
As an example of other political interference, the House committee pointed to internal White House emails that detail the private debate over how the CDC should advise churches and houses of worship during the pandemic.
"I have proposed several passages for deletion," Paul Ray, then-administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, wrote in a May 2020 email in response to the CDC's draft guidance that advised virtual or drive-in options for religious services. Ray said those suggestions "raise religious liberty concerns" and that the CDC should only publish its advice after "striking the offensive passages."
In a statement to The Post, Ray defended his actions.
"Each faith tradition—not the federal government—is best situated to understand the demands of its own beliefs and therefore to choose, among the multiple effective means of preventing the virus's spread, those means that best comport with its beliefs," Ray wrote. "The edits proposed to this document were designed to keep Americans safe while respecting their right to worship as they believe they should."
Democratic Rep.
"As today's new evidence also makes clear, Trump White House officials worked under the direction of the former president to purposefully undercut public health officials' recommendations and muzzle their ability to communicate clearly to the American public," Clyburn said in a statement.
Lauren Fine, a spokesperson for Rep. Steve Scalise, who is the top Republican on the committee, slammed Democrats for not investigating how teacher unions shaped the CDC's guidance on reopening schools. Republican senators have previously pressed the Biden administration on the current CDC's communication with unions. Fine defended the Trump administration for striking a "appropriate balance" between pandemic mitigation efforts and religious freedom.
"A pandemic still does not allow the Bill of Rights to be cast aside," Fine said in a statement to Insider. It's a shame Democrats refuse to investigate actual political interference with liberal teachers unions dictating CDC guidance to keep children locked out of school, resulting in learning losses and a mass mental health crisis among our youth."