The New York Times reprimanded one of its reporters for advocating that Robert Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, should resign from his post.
Donald McNeil Jr., a science and health reporter specializing in plagues and pestilences, argued Redfield should resign over his inadequate response to the coronavirus pandemic, in a Tuesday interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour.
“In an interview with Christiane Amanpour today, Donald McNeil went too far in expressing his personal views,” a spokeswoman from the New York Times told the Washington Examiner on Tuesday, which was first reported by the Washington Post. “His editors have discussed the issue with him to reiterate that his job is to report the facts and not to offer his own opinions. We are confident that his reporting on science and medicine for the Times has been scrupulously fair and accurate.”
In the interview, McNeil called the U.S. response to the pandemic “the president’s fault,” before turning his ire to Redfield.
“The head of the Chinese CDC was on the phone to Robert Redfield on Jan. 1, again on Jan. 8, and the two agencies were talking on Jan. 19. The Chinese had a test on Jan. 13; the Germans had a test on Jan. 16. We fiddled around for two months, we had a test on March 5, and it didn’t work. We didn’t have 10,000 people tested until March 15,” he said. “So we lost two months there, and that was because of incompetent leadership at the CDC, I’m sorry to say — it’s a great agency, but it’s incompetently led, and I think Dr. Redfield should resign.”
McNeil has been at the New York Times since 1976 and has covered public health crises such as AIDS, Ebola, malaria, swine and bird flu, mad cow disease, and SARS.
