Dr. Robert Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is reportedly in the hot seat as the Trump administration has seemingly grown tired of his handling of the coronavirus.
Rumors that members of the White House are growing increasingly tired of Redfield grew louder over the weekend when White House trade adviser Peter Navarro, who is also the coordinator of the Defense Production Act response, said that the CDC had “let the country down” with regard to coronavirus testing in the beginning of the pandemic.
President Trump has also privately derided the CDC, but he did not single out Redfield during his Tuesday lunch meeting with Republican senators on Capitol Hill, sources familiar with the discussion told CNN.
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While one official said no change to Redfield’s role is imminent, another indicated that the White House has had informal conversations about potentially replacing him at the helm of the CDC, the outlet reported. Redfield told colleagues as recently as last week that he didn’t believe his job was on the line but grew concerned over the weekend that he has a target on his back, according to CNN.
He has recently clashed with Dr. Deborah Birx, a leading member of the White House coronavirus task force who took issue with the way the CDC gathers data on the coronavirus, arguing that its process is antiquated and causes inaccurate and delayed numbers on both COVID-19 cases and deaths.
“There is nothing from the CDC that I can trust,” Birx reportedly said, arguing that the CDC’s tracking data might be inflating figures such as the mortality rate by as much as 25%.
During his Tuesday luncheon, Trump briefly criticized the CDC for the slow rollout of adequate testing but also touted the increased production of testing that is now widely available, Sen. Bill Cassidy, a Louisiana Republican, said. He “covered lots of topics,” and “one-half of one line” was about the initial CDC coronavirus tests that failed in February.
“I would not call that as quite critical. I would call that a kind of observation that everybody else has made. But then, he spoke about how many tests we have now,” Cassidy said.
