MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
One year ago this weekend, life as we knew it was about to change. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the CDC, had been tracking a cluster of what looked like pneumonia cases in the Chinese city of Wuhan. They'd issued an alert, told health care providers to be on the lookout for symptoms in patients who had been to Wuhan. And then January 17, 2020, the CDC made this announcement.
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MARTIN CETRON: To further protect the health of the American public during the emergence of this new coronavirus, beginning today CDC will be screening passengers on direct and connecting flights from Wuhan.
KELLY: Two days later, a man walked into an urgent care clinic in Washington state with a persistent cough. He had recently been in China, so he was given a test. Results came back the next day - positive.
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UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Tonight, the CDC says the infected passenger passed through busy SeaTac Airport in Seattle, the first confirmed U.S. case of the contagious coronavirus.
KELLY: The very first confirmed case in the United States. Well, as you can hear, the CDC, as the preeminent public health agency in the U.S., has been at the center of the response to the pandemic from the start. The head of the CDC is Dr. Robert Redfield. He's in the job for five more days, until January 20. Dr. Redfield, I want to welcome you. And I want to start by saying thank you for your service in what has been an unimaginably difficult year for all of us. And I can't imagine how true that is for you and your staff on the front lines. So thank you.
ROBERT REDFIELD: Well, thank you, Mary Louise.
KELLY: I am about to ask you some hard questions about the CDC's performance over this last year. And I will begin here - why has the U.S. done so much worse than the rest of the world?
REDFIELD: You know, I think it's - this virus has a unique ability to have differential pathogenesis in different people. And what it really does is it exploits the underlying health condition of the individual it infects. And so I would argue one of the reasons we're having more significant death in this country than, say, Sweden - because, unfortunately, the underlying health conditions with obesity, diabetes, heart disease, kidney disease and the significant health disparities that we have in these illnesses in our nation haven't been effectively addressed.
KELLY: Absolutely correct to note that there are underlying health problems and racial disparities that have complicated this. But in terms of how the U.S. has responded, in terms of how the CDC has responded - we're about to pass the milestone of 400,000 American deaths, nearly 4,000 deaths just yesterday. Are you able to defend the Trump administration's record on this as anything other than a catastrophic failure?
REDFIELD: Well, I'm actually very proud of the response the CDC has done. I think if I have one criticism that I do believe is significant - is the importance of consistency and unity of message. CDC, obviously, you know, on April 3, stressed the American public the importance of wearing a face covering, a mask. And that, coupled with social distancing and hand-washing and avoiding crowds, really could be an enormous defense against this pathogen if we all did it. But we all had to do it.
KELLY: Let me follow on a couple of things that you raise. On public messaging, your successor, incoming CDC director Rochelle Walensky, published a piece in The New York Times this week, in which she cites reports that, quote, "White House officials interfered with official guidance issued by the CDC." Dr. Redfield, did the White House interfere with your work?
REDFIELD: No, but there was review by different agencies. Again, my predecessors have fought pandemic...
KELLY: Just to pause you there for a second, sir. You're saying no, there was no interference - there was no undermining of the CDC messaging throughout this?
REDFIELD: I'm saying there was - at the end of the day, that there was review and comments by different agencies within the White House. But at the end of the day, the CDC published the guidance that we believe is the most important for the American public.
KELLY: Last September, you testified before a Senate panel that masks were an effective tool to combat spread, also that a vaccine would not be widely available, available to the general public, until summer or fall of this year, 2021. And a few hours later, the president came out, gave a press conference and contradicted you on both points. He said you were confused. Were you confused?
REDFIELD: No. I stand by my comments that masks are an extremely effective - and what I was trying to point out, if you had a vaccine that was 50% effective and you were the half that it didn't work in, your mask is your best shot.
KELLY: Dr. Walensky, your incoming successor, also in this piece that she published in The New York Times this week wrote this - quote, "Our team of scientists will have to work very hard to restore public trust in the CDC at home and abroad because it has been undermined over the last year." She went on - "the gold standard for the nation's public health has been tarnished."
REDFIELD: Yeah.
KELLY: How would you respond to that?
REDFIELD: That's just not true. The men and women at CDC are highly respected across this nation and around the world. Clearly, there's no doubt that the lack of reinforcement and support from some individuals in the administration of the public health message had impact. But CDC continues to be the premier public health agency in the world.
KELLY: But when you say the messaging - that the public messaging was a problem, what do you see as your role in that? Who do you ultimately answer to? Is it the American people? Is it science? Is it the president?
REDFIELD: Well, for me, it's obviously science, data science and public service. I think you saw that for me personally...
KELLY: So when the president came out and contradicted you and said, he's confused, do you have an obligation then to stand up and say, no, sir?
REDFIELD: Well, what I did was just repeat the position that I took. I didn't change the position; I just repeated the position, as I did for you just now. I think it would have been, you know, preferred as a nation, in April, when we recommended and I started wearing a mask and all of us at CDC did and the doctors within the coronavirus task force did. It would have been very helpful if that was reflected by civic leadership throughout our nation, that they all embrace it at the same time, rather than, unfortunately, what appeared to be this critical public health measure somehow got used as a political football.
KELLY: When you say the CDC has done everything it could to get the right guidance out there, to get good public messaging out there, why did the CDC stop giving press conferences for critical months in the middle of the pandemic?
REDFIELD: Yeah, you know, I'm very disappointed in that. Again, the reality is...
KELLY: But you're in charge of it. So why - when we went back and looked at the numbers, they - in January, you did 10 media telebriefings. In February, you did eight. And then it fell off a cliff. There were two in March, zero in April, zero in May. Why?
REDFIELD: Yeah. I would say, you know, that ultimately, the ability to do those briefings had to be cleared by the secretaries of health's office for us to be able to do those. That's the system that's in place under the current relationship between CDC and the secretary of health.
KELLY: I want to point back to a moment. I interviewed you in April of last year, and I asked you what your sense was of where we were in the arc of this, and here's what you said.
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REDFIELD: We're nearing the peak of the outbreak, the pandemic in our country right now. And I think we'll begin to see the curve begin to go down, and I expect we'll see that continue aggressively decrease in cases over the next couple of weeks across the country.
KELLY: Dr. Redfield, that was April 9. What goes through your mind when you hear those words now?
REDFIELD: Well, as you know, Mary Louise, we were looking at that at the time of what we call the first peak, the spring surge, and obviously, that was at a time when we still didn't understand to the fullest degree asymptomatic, silent epidemic. What I say right now is, we're about to be in the worst of it. And I think if you've listened to my comments in September, August and September, I told people that I really thought that the - December, January and February were going to be the roughest time this nation's ever, ever experienced from a public health point of view in the history of our nation.
KELLY: That brings me to the last thing I wanted to ask you, which was the vaccine. When will we get to the point where the vaccine is going to be available to the general public - everybody can get one?
REDFIELD: Well, you know, that would be speculative. But I - as I said even earlier, in my testimony in Congress, I didn't see that day coming until end of the second quarter, beginning of the third quarter of 2021. And you noted that a number of people pushed out against me on that. But, you know, I know people are critical. I'm not going to quote the whole Teddy Roosevelt quote about the critic and the man in the arena. Obviously, I feel I've been the man in the arena. I'm ready for the postmortem.
But I do want to not get people shocked when they understand - you know, when I said that we were going to be in for day after day after day back in early December of losing more people than we lost in Pearl Harbor and 9/11 every day, I didn't like saying that, but I said it because I believed it to be true, based on the data. And unfortunately, what we've continued to see - that the huge loss of human life - and I have great empathy. I've lost friends. I've lost family members that have had friends and family members - or friends of family members that they've lost. It's been a huge toll on the American public. When you think about, just like you said, 4,000 people the other day...
KELLY: Yesterday.
REDFIELD: This has been one of the greatest criseses (ph) that this nation's had. There'll be plenty of time, I'm sure, in the years to come to figure out who could have done something better. All I can say, from the time I got to be CDC director, is that I did the best that I can.
KELLY: That is Robert Redfield, the outgoing director of the CDC, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Dr. Redfield, thank you.
REDFIELD: Thank you very much, Mary Louise.
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