In 2019, the Trump Administration set a course to address chronic disease, funding earlier interventions to curb the growing crisis. Five years later, this issue is exactly where it needs to be: at the center of the presidential debate, now in a unique partnership to heal our children, a president must see the possible and lead our nation to act. After more than 40 years in the public health arena, it might surprise some of my colleagues to know I think President Trump chose the right man for the job: Robert Kennedy, Jr.
That was former Centers for Disease Control (CDC) director Robert Redfield in a September 24 Newsweek editorial headlined “Donald Trump has a plan to make America’s children healthy again.” According to Redfield:
Kennedy is right: All three of the principal health agencies suffer from agency capture. A large portion of the FDA’s budget is provided by pharmaceutical companies. NIH is cozy with biomedical and pharmaceutical companies and its scientists are allowed to collect royalties on drugs NIH licenses to pharma.
Kennedy found the praise “breathtaking” because he had gone after Redfield “with hammer and tongs in my Fauci book.” Redfield told Kennedy “you got everything right,” which is saying something. Kennedy’s The Real Anthony Fauci is a devastating takedown of the longtime National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) boss. Back in the 1990s, Nobel laureate Kary Mullis, inventor of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), contended that Fauci “doesn’t understand electron microscopy and doesn’t understand medicine. He should not be in a position like he’s in.”
Redfield earned a medical degree at Georgetown, served in the Army’s medical corps, co-founded the University of Maryland’s Institute of Virology and served as chief of infectious diseases. Despite these qualifications, the government’s first mouthpiece on the covid pandemic was CDC official Dr. Nancy Messonnier, a veteran of the CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS). In a series of briefings in early 2020, Dr. Messonnier traced the origin of the pandemic to “the Wuhan market.”
Redfield spotted a laboratory origin, which earned him death threats from fellow scientists. He was replaced by Dr. Rochelle Walensky who proclaimed Messonnier a “true hero.” Since her sudden retirement in May of 2021, the EIS veteran has been rather quiet. Not so the embattled Redfield, on record that the mRNA vaccines did not prevent infection and “never should have been mandated.” In a March 2023 hearing on the origin of covid, Redfield was asked if gain-of-function research had ever stopped a pandemic.
“No, on the contrary,” the virologist testified. “I think it probably caused the greatest pandemic our world has seen,” and had not created any life-saving treatments or vaccines that he could find. Dr. Redfield now contends that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. got “everything right” about Fauci, the white coat supremacist who funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
