Amid controversy over his agency’s tally of coronavirus deaths, his questionable claim that the second wave could be worse than the first, and problems with testing, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is on the hot seat.
But it wouldn’t be the first time for Robert Redfield, who was a driving force behind the AIDS hysteria in the 1980s and 1990s, points out Michael Fumento in an analysis for Just the News.
Fumento is the author of the 1990s book “The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS,” which documented Redfield’s wildly inaccurate claims about HIV.
The author pointed out that none other than White House coronavirus adviser Dr. Deborah Birx has challenged the CDC’s count of coronavirus cases and deaths, according to the Washington Post.
At a meeting, Birx and others expressed frustration with the CDC’s
system for tracking virus data, which they feared was inflating the mortality rate and case count by as much as 25%.
Two sources, according to the Post, alleged Birx said, “There is nothing from the CDC that I can trust.”
In addition, Redfield recently told the Washington Post in an interview that there’s a “possibility that the assault of the virus on our nation next winter will actually be even more difficult than the one we just went through.”
“We’re going to have the flu epidemic and the coronavirus epidemic at the same time,” he said.
“When I’ve said this to others, they kind of put their head back, they don’t understand what I mean,” he added.
But Fumento points out the current pandemic also coincides with the flu season. And he argues there will be key differences that will make it easier to cope with the virus this fall, such as the possibility of treatments and being better prepared with equipment.
“Most importantly, a significant portion of the population will have already been exposed by then and either developed immunity (as antibody tests are now showing) or died, whereas during the first wave nobody was immune.”
Fumento also took issue with Redfield’s claim that the coronavirus pandemic is “the greatest public health crisis that has hit this nation in more than 100 years.”
Fumento pointed out U.S. coronavirus deaths peaked some time ago, according to the European Centre for Disease Control, “and even using the controversially expansive CDC definition of Covid-19 death requiring no test, we appear to be falling far below that figure, with a current death toll of 70,802. (Experience from Italy indicates that a subsequent evaluation for deaths actually caused by the virus should drop those numbers dramatically; they found only 12% direct causation.)”
For one, the “Asian flu” of 1957-1958 killed an estimated 2 million people worldwide and about 70,000 in the United States. Adjusted for the current population, the latter figure would be 140,000.
“Even with that expansive definition of death causality, 140,000 Covid-19 deaths seems highly unlikely,” he said.
Fumento puts Redfield’s predictions in perspective by, among other things, recounting his claims about AIDS.
Citing his book, Fumento recalled that Redfield declared the chances of male-to-female vaginal HIV were 50% per contact. But data available at that time showed the odds of contracting AIDS was near zero if neither partner had genital sores or other openings.
The costliest failure of Redfield’s career, Fumento believes, could be the CDC’s mishandling of initiating COVID-19 testing.
Instead of deploying a widely used test developed in Germany for the World Health Organization, the CDC chose to develop one of its own.
In the process, it failed to follow appropriate manufacturing procedures, according to a Washington Post investigation, leading to contamination of one of the components used in the tests and further delay.
Fumento ended on an ironic note.
In 1983, a scientist-doctor was the single author of a paper in the prestigious medical journal JAMA stating AIDS might be transmissible through “routine close contact, as within a family household.”
The media propagated the myth, spawning hysteria.
Nevertheless, months later the author became director of the National Institutes of Allergies and Infectious Diseases.
And he still holds that position today. That’s right. Dr. Anthony Fauci.
