One host, Starnes, mused that local officials’ orders on social distancing were “incredibly unconstitutional” and likened mainstream media coverage of coronavirus to a “big Netflix special” in a quest for ratings and attention.
The CDC is usually the lodestar of any U.S. public health crisis. But in this pandemic it’s known as the agency that developed and defended the flawed test that let the coronavirus spread far and wide before American officials understood the calamity’s scope.
As the face and voice of the CDC, Redfield has been almost invisible as heads of other federal health and science agencies stand alongside President Donald Trump at the daily White House briefings, appear on the Sunday talk shows, tweet their #Socialdistancing tips and get profiled on TV. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease Director Anthony Fauci even had his face printed onto one bakery’s cupcakes.
But on these local and regional outlets, Redfield may be filling the role of “trusted communicator” for the conservative audience skeptical of mainstream media and the public health establishment, said MIT political scientist Adam Berinsky, who studies the sticking power of misinformation and tactics to counter it.
If you are looking for someone to close the partisan gap on coronavirus, Redfield, he said, has the “kind of impeccable credentials you need.”
On the shows, Redfield mostly stays on the White House message — although he doesn’t rush to embrace everything Trump himself has said. For instance, on the malaria drugs that Trump has relentlessly pushed as a Covid-19 treatment despite a lack of evidence, he’s adopted a studied neutrality.
Asked for his expert opinion on hydroxychloroquine, the CDC director usually starts out by praising the American pharmaceutical industry’s “ingenuity,” before addressing the specific drug. “It’s going to be studied in a controlled clinical trial too, which will be more definitive,” Redfield told Piscopo.
Facing similar questions on the Dom Giordano show — before a Philadelphia-area conservative host — Redfield referenced his own early medical career treating patients for HIV. During the AIDS crisis, he explained, doctors would try many therapies, even though they knew there wasn’t much proof for them. “Many of us, including myself, used off-label drugs,” he said, and doctors might think similarly about hydroxychloroquine or remdesivir, another prominent therapeutic candidate, in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. “It’s not something I would discourage. It’s not something I would necessarily recommend,” he said.
“I think I would be confident to try hydroxychloroquine,” he concluded, and the drug “does appear to be safe.” Some critics of Trump’s emphatic endorsements of the unproven treatment have noted it can aggravate heart arrhythmia in some patients. On Wednesday, the CDC removed a guidance related to hydroxychloroquine from its website, according to Reuters.
On testing, he’s defended his agency even though the CDC’s performance has been excoriated by health experts far and wide. On one show he called the coronavirus test an “excellent” one, constrained by state public health labs’ technological bottlenecks to process them rapidly. On another Fox News podcast, Redfield tried to shift the testing focus to “commercial, clinical medicine.”
“That has never been CDC’s responsibility,” he said.
Redfield has also echoed Trump’s claims that the U.S. is ahead of much of the world on testing. For instance, in a March 27 appearance on the Ross Kaminsky show, he declared, “We did more tests than Korea did in eight weeks, we did in the last eight days.” He didn’t note the United States started late — and has more than six times the population.
But Redfield’s appearances do sometimes break the hosts’ emotional tenor. Last week Starnes — who describes his podcast as serving “gun-toting, Bible-clinging Deplorables” — called New York City a “de facto police state,” with motorcycle gangs roaming the streets. Redfield, appearing later, stuck with his message that social distancing could save lives.
Throughout the run of shows, Redfield has subtly put down the initial Chinese response to the virus as inadequate and harmful. When asked about China, he usually notes that his counterparts at the Chinese CDC initially believed the disease did not hop from human-to-human. “I always assumed it would go human-to-human,” he said on the Ross Kaminsky Show on March 26.
But he didn’t expect it to spread this fast.
“No one could have predicted how transmissible, how infectious this virus really is,” he said on Fox News’s Brian Kilmeade Show.
Daniel Lippman contributed reporting.
Source: politico.com
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