Dr Redfield CDC

<p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">belated, see CDC, covid caputo</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></p><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">an 3 23</font></div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" /><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">'Ignorance about the biological function': Virologist dispels testimony from GOP’s lab link 'expert'</font></div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Dr. Robert R. Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, joined by President Donald J. Trump and Vice President Mike Pence, along with members of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, addresses his remarks at a coronavirus update briefing Wednesday, April 8, 2020, in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House. (Official White House Photo by D. Myles Cullen)</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Lindsay BeyersteinandThe Editorial BoardMarch 10, 2023</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>
</b></div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>Proponents of a lab origin for SARS-Cov-2 are trying to make it seem as if new evidence for their conjecture is rapidly accumulating.</b></div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>
</b></div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>But Wednesday’s House Oversight hearing on the origins of the coronavirus seemed as if wiped from a bat’s butt. It was the same old players ruminating over the same stale conspiracy theories.</b></div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">You wouldn’t know it from the hearing, but a lot has been done in the last three years to ferret out the origins of SARS-Cov-2.</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">After an all-out sprint called by President Biden to uncover the origins of the virus, the consensus of the US intelligence community remains that SARS-Cov-2 probably spilled over from wild animals, and that it’s neither genetically engineered nor a bioweapon.</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Three years on, there’s still no evidence that the Wuhan Institute of Virology (or any other lab) had SARS-Cov-2 or any plausible progenitor virus before the outbreak. Most importantly, research has shown that the earliest cases of covid were tightly linked to one of the few markets in Wuhan that sold trafficked wildlife.</span></div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</span></div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The GOP’s star witness was Dr. Robert Redfield, the former director of the Centers for Disease Control under Donald Trump.</span></div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The Republicans on the committee staked a lot on his credibility because, unlike their other witnesses (a science writer, and a self-described technology futurist), Redfield’s a virologist.</span></div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</span></div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">But Redfield botched basic facts in his testimony. And these weren’t trivial misstatements. He put false claims forward as his main reasons for thinking that SARS-Cov-2 was genetically engineered.</span></div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</span></div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Redfield’s critics had plenty of time to roast him on Twitter because the GOP majority didn’t see fit to call any real virus experts to testify.</span></div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“Just looked in on the COVID origins to hear Redfield talking complete and utter gibberish,” tweeted Dr. Paul Bieniasz, who studies the evolution of viruses at the Rockefeller University.</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">Redfield falsely asserted that the SARS1 and MERS coronaviruses cannot spread person-to-person. He said, as a scientist, that he realized immediately that the Covid-19 virus was genetically engineered because it seemed designed to spread person-to-person, unlike SARS1 and MERS, which don’t spread that way</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">.</span></div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Actually, the SARS1 and MERS coronaviruses do spread between people. SARS1 was so good at spreading person-to-person that it went to Canada all the way from China to kill hundreds.</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">So much for that argument.</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Redfield insinuated that Chinese researchers must have taken a harmless bat virus and inserted into it a special sequence to make it infectious to people. In saying so, he grossly misstated the function of a viral feature known as the furin cleavage site (FCS). He said he suspected covid was genetically engineered because the virus’s furin cleavage site “totally changes the orientation of the binding domain of Covid [...] so it has high affinity for human [ACE2] receptors.”</span></div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</span></div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">None of this is true.</span></div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“The furin site is not involved in spike binding to the ACE2 receptor, and insertion of the furin site does not reorient the receptor binding domain to allow recognition of human ACE2,” Stephen Goldstein, a virologist at the University of Utah, explained to me.</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“It's a stunning revelation about Redfield's ignorance about the biological function of the FCS as well as even a basic understanding of the Spike-ACE2 binding and viral entry,” said Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan, and a co-author of one of the most influential papers arguing for a natural origin.</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>
</b></div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>Redfield also spent time whining about how Anthony Fauci excluded him from a working group investigating the origins of SARS-Cov-2.</b></div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“It was told to me that they wanted a single narrative and that I obviously had a different point of view,” Redfield claimed.</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">He offered no evidence to support his claim that he’d been excluded because of his opinion that the virus was genetically engineered. However, Redfield’s claim is unlikely true because scientists who were initially sympathetic to a lab origin were invited to participate.</span></div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Maybe they thought Redfield was busy running the CDC during a global pandemic.</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Or maybe Redfield was left out because he doesn’t know a furin cleavage site from a fusilli.</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Do I need a booster shot if I got the Johnson & Johnson vaccine? A virologist answers 5 questions ›</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Kevin McCarthy's debt to the 'anti-science resistance' is a recipe for 'epidemiological disaster': virologist ›</div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">'A cascade effect': Leading Spanish virologist explains why China’s COVID-19 surge is 'worrisome' ›</div></div><div times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></p></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">=</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">an 920</font></div><div><h1 class="widgetheadline h1" style="margin: 10px 0px 0px; padding: 0px; font-size: 1em; font-family: Helvetica; color: rgb(31, 31, 31); cursor: pointer; overflow-wrap: break-word; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><a class="widgetheadline-text custom-post-headline" href="https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/everything-he-says-is-false-nbc-reporter-overheard-cdc-director-slamming-trump-coronavirus-adviser/" aria-label="‘Everything he says is false’: NBC reporter overheard CDC director slamming Trump coronavirus adviser" style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s; font-family: " open="Open" sans="Sans" sans-serif="sans-serif" word-break="word-break" break-word="break-word" overflow-wrap="overflow-wrap" font-size="font-size" px="px" line-height="line-height">Everything he says is false’: NBC reporter overheard CDC director slamming Trump coronavirus adviser</a></h1><div class="social-author clearfix" style="margin-top: 10px; display: inline-block; color: rgb(31, 31, 31); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 17.6px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><a class="social-authorname" href="https://www.alternet.org/author/alex-henderson" style="color: rgb(31, 31, 31); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s; overflow-wrap: break-word; font-size: 12px; line-height: 1.4; display: inline; overflow: hidden; text-overflow: ellipsis; white-space: nowrap; position: relative; font-family: Cabin, sans-serif; vertical-align: baseline;">Alex Henderson</a></div><span style="color: rgb(31, 31, 31); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 17.6px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> </span><div class="social-date" style="margin-top: 8px; display: inline-block; color: rgb(164, 162, 160); font-size: 1.4rem; vertical-align: top; font-family: Helvetica; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> <span class="social-datetext" style="font-size: 12px; color: rgb(142, 142, 142); top: 3px; position: relative; font-family: Cabin, sans-serif; line-height: 1; left: -3px;">September 28, 2020</span></div><div class="body js-expandable clearfix js-listicle-body css-listicle-body-2647844389" style="margin-top: 10px; -webkit-box-orient: vertical; font-size: 17px; font-family: Cabin, sans-serif; color: rgb(49, 49, 49); text-overflow: ellipsis; display: -webkit-box; -webkit-line-clamp: 4; overflow: hidden; line-height: 31px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div class="body-description"><p>Dr. Scott Atlas has turned into President Donald Trump's favorite member of the White House coronavirus response team, and Atlas is clashing with other health experts in the federal government — including Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the Center</p></div></div></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">=</font></div><div><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">ref nyt</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">no lnx</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/18/us/politics/trump-cdc-coronavirus.html">https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/18/us/politics/trump-cdc-coronavirus.html</a></font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Emails Detail Effort to Silence C.D.C. and Question Its Science</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Emails from a former top Trump health official and his science adviser show how the two refused to accept Centers for Disease Control and Prevention science and sought to silence the agency.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Michael R. Caputo, the Department of Health and Human Services’s top spokesman, went on medical leave this week, days after he attacked C.D.C. scientists in a bizarre Facebook video. </font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Noah Weiland</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">By Noah Weiland</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Sept. 18, 2020</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">WASHINGTON — On June 30, as the coronavirus was cresting toward its summer peak, Dr. Paul Alexander, a new science adviser at the Department of Health and Human Services, composed a scathing two-page critique of an interview given by an experienced scientist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Dr. Anne Schuchat, a 32-year veteran of the C.D.C. and its principal deputy director, had appealed to Americans to wear masks and warned, “We have way too much virus across the country.” But Dr. Alexander, a part-time assistant professor of health research methods, appeared sure he understood the coronavirus better.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><b>“Her aim is to embarrass the president,” he wrote, commenting on Dr. Schuchat’s appeal for face masks in an interview with The Journal of the American Medical Association.</b></font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><b>“She is duplicitous,</b>” he also wrote in an email to his boss, Michael R. Caputo, the Department of Health and Human Services’s top spokesman who went on medical leave this week. He asked Mr. Caputo to “remind” Dr. Schuchat that during the H1N1 swine flu outbreak in 2009, thousands of Americans had died “under her work.”</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">ImageFrom a Trump science adviser’s critique of the C.D.C. scientist Dr. Anne Schuchat.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">From a Trump science adviser’s critique of the C.D.C. scientist Dr. Anne Schuchat.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><b>Of Dr. Schuchat’s assessment of the dangers of Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, he fumed, wrongly, “The risk of death in children 0-19 years of age is basically 0 (zero) … PERIOD … she has lied.”</b></font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Dr. Alexander’s point-by-point assessment, broken into seven parts and forwarded by Mr. Caputo to Dr. Robert R. Redfield, the C.D.C. director, was one of several emails obtained by The New York Times that illustrate how Mr. Caputo and Dr. Alexander tried to browbeat career officials at the C.D.C. at the height of the pandemic, challenging the science behind their public statements and trying to silence agency staff.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><b>On Friday, two days after Mr. Caputo went on medical leave and Dr. Alexander was dismissed from the Department of Health and Human Services, the C.D.C. reversed a heavily criticized recommendation suggesting that people who have had close contact with a person infected with the coronavirus do not need to get tested if they have no symptoms. </b>The emails shed light on the monthslong fight that led to their departures.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Far from hiding what they knew about the virus’s danger, as Bob Woodward’s new book contends President Trump was doing, the emails seem to indicate that aides in Washington were convinced of their own rosy prognostications, even as coronavirus infections were shooting skyward.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">At the same time, Mr. Caputo moved to<b> punish the C.D.C.’s communications team for granting interviews to NPR</b> [// Hansen?] and trying to help a CNN reporter reach him about a public relations campaign. Current and former C.D.C. officials called it a five-month campaign of bullying and intimidation.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Read the Email Between Caputo and Dr. Alexander</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">In late June, as coronavirus infections were surging to their heights,<b> Dr. Paul Alexander, a science adviser at the Department of Health and Human Services, emailed a scathing critique of an interview given by Anne Schuchat, a senior scientist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention</b>. The email shows how aides in Washington bullied and tried to silence the C.D.C. at the height of the pandemic.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">For instance, after Mr. Caputo forwarded the critique of Dr. Schuchat to Dr. Redfield, C.D.C. officials became concerned when<b> a member of the health department’s White House liaison office — Catherine Granito — called the agency to ask questions about Dr. Schuchat’s biography, leaving the impression that some in Washington could have been searching for ways to fire her.</b></font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">In another instance, Mr. Caputo wrote to C.D.C. communications officials on July 15 to demand <b>they turn over the name of the press officer who approved a series of interviews between NPR and a longtime C.D.C. epidemiologist,</b> after the department in Washington had moved to take ownership of the agency’s pandemic data collection.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">“I need to know who did it,” Mr. Caputo wrote. A day later, still without a reply, Mr. Caputo wrote back. “I have not received a response to my email for 20 hours. This is unacceptable,” he said. “I need this information to properly manage department communications. If you disobey my directions, you will be held accountable.”</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">On Friday, a department spokeswoman said Mr. Caputo, in his comments about interview approvals, had been trying to make sure that the C.D.C. followed protocols dating to prior administrations that the department clear interview requests for health officials. <b>The C.D.C. did not have an immediate comment, nor did Mr. Caputo.</b></font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">[Dr. Paul Alexander, a Department of Health and Human Services science adviser, criticized the C.D.C.’s principal deputy director.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">In the months leading up to their exits, the two had routinely worked to revise and delay the C.D.C.’s closely guarded and internationally admired health bulletins, called Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports, in an effort to paint the administration’s pandemic response in a more positive light.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><b>Far from apologetic, Dr. Alexander told The Globe and Mail of Toronto this week that the C.D.C. had written “pseudoscientific reports” and that he was better suited to examine data than agency scientists</b>.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">“None of those people have my skills,” Dr. Alexander said. “I make the judgment whether this is crap.”</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The judgments he rendered — and the punishments that Mr. Caputo appeared intent to mete out — had a demoralizing effect on the agency.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">One C.D.C. communications official became so worried about Mr. Caputo’s threat that she wrote to other senior staff asking how to reply, saying that she was “uncomfortable turning over our employee’s name to Mr. Caputo, given the hostility of the message.”</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">In another email to an agency communications officer who had directed a CNN reporter to contact Mr. Caputo about a vaccine public relations campaign, Mr. Caputo shot back, “In what world did you think it was your job to announce an administration public service announcement campaign to CNN?”</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><b>The C.D.C. press official then apologized, which did not satisfy Mr. Caputo. “We will discuss this on a teleconference tomorrow,” he wrote. “I want your H.R. representative in attendance.” He then scolded the official for removing Dr. Redfield from the email thread after Mr. Caputo had added the director in a prior email.</b></font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">In the emails obtained by The Times, Mr. Caputo repeatedly added Dr. Redfield, who was overseeing an 11,000-person agency, to email chains about news media disputes. People familiar with the emails said it was an attempt to use Dr. Redfield to shame his own staff.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">People familiar with <b>Dr. Redfield’s responses</b> to the emails said that he would call senior aides sounding resigned to the orders and asking how to navigate Mr. Caputo’s demands. Often, he tried to delay or ignore Mr. Caputo until the tension subsided.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">Perhaps most illuminating in the emails was the way the top officials at the C.D.C. saw the disease in fundamentally different ways than confidants and loyalists of Mr. Trump’s. In the interview that provoked Mr. Caputo and Dr. Alexander, <b>Dr. Schuchat referred to “a lot of wishful thinking around the country that, ‘Hey, summer, everything is going to be fine, we’re over this.’”</b></font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><b>“And we are not even beginning to be over this,” she said. “I think we need to continue to learn and continue to apply what we’re learning and be humble about our assumptions.”</b></font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">At the time of her interview, the United States was setting record levels of new infections and was weeks away from an even more catastrophic peak of almost 70,000 new cases a day. States like Arizona were pausing the reopening of their businesses.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the government’s leading infectious disease expert, testified to a Senate panel that the country could hit 100,000 new cases a day.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">That portrait of the virus was at odds with the one the White House had strained to present. The day Dr. Schuchat lamented there was “way too much virus across the country,” Kayleigh McEnany, the White House press secretary, told reporters, “We’re aware that there are embers that need to be put out.”</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">Mr. Trump said in an interview with Fox Business Network that week that he believed the virus was “at some point” going to “sort of just disappear, I hope.”</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Dr. Alexander also had his own ideas of the virus’s staying power. He disputed Dr. Schuchat’s claim that children were vulnerable to it. Studies have repeatedly demonstrated that <b>while it is rare, the virus can be lethal to children, who can readily transmit it to more vulnerable family members.</b></font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">“It also causes no symptoms as it is so mild … you don’t even know you have it,” Dr. Alexander wrote. “Many people never knew they had it. Not one indication. It is very false her statement that it causes death in children.”</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">At one point in his response to Dr. Schuchat, Dr. Alexander appeared to endorse the largely rejected strategy of “herd immunity,”</span> or allowing the virus to freely spread until enough people develop antibodies that it dies for lack of human hosts.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><b>“Importantly, having the virus spread among the young and healthy is one of the methods to drive herd immunity,” he wrote. “This was not the intended strategy but all must be on deck now and it is contributing positively at some level.”</b></font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The clashes between the White House and C.D.C. intensified this week, when Mr. Trump publicly slapped down congressional testimony Dr. Redfield gave, in which he praised masks and estimated that a vaccine might not be widely available to the public until the middle of 2021.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">“I think he made a mistake when he said that,” Mr. Trump told reporters on Wednesday.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">On Friday, the president told reporters the broad American public would have access to a coronavirus vaccine by April, again snubbing his C.D.C. chief.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" /></font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Sharon LaFraniere contributed reporting.</font></font></font></p></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></font></font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></font></font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">an 920 mid-2021, masks best weapon [even if vax works 70%?]</font></font></font></p><div class="mag-header" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 19px; padding: 0px; position: relative; color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Cabin, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><h3 class="magcat-titlte entry-title" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; font-size: 17px; font-family: " open="Open" sans="Sans" sans-serif="sans-serif" letter-spacing="letter-spacing" px="px"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/trump-s-his-own-cdc-directors-claims-about-vaccines/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; color: rgb(49, 49, 49); transition: all 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer; display: block; font-size: 18px; letter-spacing: 0px; line-height: 1.4;">trump attacks his own CDC director’s claims about coronavirus vaccines</a></font></font></h3><div class="grid-post-box-meta mag-meta" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 7px 0px 0px; padding: 0px; font-size: 12px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span class="author-italic author vcard" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; color: rgb(136, 136, 136); font-size: inherit;"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/author/cody-fenwick/" title="Posts by Cody Fenwick" class="author url fn" rel="author" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; color: rgb(49, 49, 49); transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer; font-size: inherit;">Cody Fenwick</a></span></font></font></div></div><div class="mag-excerpt entry-content" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Cabin, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.5;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As the administration faced doubts about the integrity of its approval process for a coronavirus vaccine, President Donald Trump went on the attack Wednesday against CDC Director Robert Redfield’s claims…</font></font></p></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">===</font></font></font></div>