What Happened to the CDC?

its missteps early on in the crisis. But first, here's what happened today. Talk is increasingly turning to how and when the US can restart its economy and what a rebooted economy would look like. Dr Anthony Faucci, the top infectious disease expert in the US, said Monday that parts of the US could be ready to ease up on coronavirus related restrictions in May, but Faucci and many others

say that would depend on widespread testing becoming available. Faucci also said the US could see a second wave of the virus in November. The likelihood that the outbreak will keep coming and going in cycles has Neil Cash Kari, president of the Minneapolis Federal Reserve, predicting eighteen months of rolling shutdowns. Cash Cary said on CBS's Face the Nation that without a vaccine or therapy for COVID nineteen, we will continue to have to reimpose and then ease social

distancing restrictions to keep the virus contained. About that vaccine, the World Health Organization has said there are seventy coronavirus vaccines in development around the world. Three of them are already being tested in human trials. Hong Kong company Cancino Biologics and Beijing's Institute of Biotechnology have the two drugs that are farthest along in the pipeline. Scientists are working at an unprecedented speed to get a vaccine to market

in the next year to eighteen months. It's a process that usually takes ten or fifteen years, and the Centers for Disease Controlled Director Robert Redfield said in recent interviews that the coronavirus has stabilized across the US and he thinks the country is close to a peak in cases, but the US still leads the world in new cases, and New York reported its death toll shot past ten thousand over the Easter weekend. Now for our main story,

what happened at the CDC. We've traditionally thought of the CDC as being the agency in charge of detecting and tamping down outbreaks of disease. But when it comes to coronavirus, they have been criticized for getting off to a late inadequate start with testing, and the agency has not been the public face of the disease response. They've largely taken a back seat to the White House and its task force. I recently had the chance to speak with Bloomberg reporters

Michelle fake Cortez and John Tozzi. They interviewed Robert Redfield for over an hour about the CDC's response to the pandemic. To start off, I asked Michelle to tell a bit about the overall history and mission of the agency. The CDC has been viewed as the gold standard worldwide when it comes to controlling infectious disease. Is even in China.

Their agency there is known as the Chinese CDC, and everybody has looked to the US to control these sorts of outbreaks and to understand what's happening on the in the world. The CDC researchers and staff members have actually been the ones who have trained many of the people worldwide who handle infectious disease outbreaks. So in the United States, all of our politicians are leaders public health officials across

the entire country. Really thought that the CDC was the premier institution that would be directing the entire way that the government is going to respond. And the CDC director is Robert Redfield. Tell me about it. Robert Redfield is absolutely a renowned virologist in America. It's amazing because he is probably one of the people who are most ideally situated to be attacking this situation head on. He served for twenty years and the U. S. Army Medical Corps.

He was a founding director of the Department of Retroviral Research, which was part of the military's HIV research program. After he retired from that position, he founded the Institute of Human Virology at the University of Maryland. He knows what he's talking about when it comes to viruses in virology, and he knows how to handle terrifying, unexpected new outbreaks

of disease. So the CDC is led by this renowned expert, and the country was counting on them to manage the coronavirus response, but there have been a lot of mistakes made by the CDC, particularly around testing John what happened there. I think from the kind of early weeks of the outbreak in the United States, there was a sense that we did not have enough tests or fast enough tests to really detect the virus as it was, you know,

maybe spreading silently in some communities. The CDC developed the first test in the United States, but when it sent that test to state public health labs, it didn't work and that set set the whole country back for a couple of CREWFI weeks. YouTube interviewed Robert Redfield about all this. What is his opinion of how the agency has performed, particularly when it comes to coordinating public response to the outbreak.

Redfield defended how the CDC responded to the outbreak, and he said that a lot of the kind of narratives out there about the agency were incorrect. He said that the CDC is still the premier public health agency in the world, and he thought that the the agency would actually come out of this with its with its reputation and its capabilities enhanced um and specifically on the question of testing. He said that the CDC did its job, that it developed an initial test quick really once the

genetic sequence of the virus was available. They had a test that worked at the CDC headquarters in a week or just over a week, and that you know there was a failure when you know, there was a problem when the that test was sent to state public health labs. That took a couple of weeks to correct. UM. But the question more of more broad testing capacity in hospitals,

in commercial labs. Um, you know, the ability of people who think they are sick or think they might have the virus to actually find out on a broad scale. He essentially said that that's not the responsibility of the Centers for Disease Control, that that's the responsibility of uh, you know, the healthcare industry and the clinical laboratories in the United States. I think that that's exactly where the rub is here. The thing is is that Americans expected

the CDC to be front and center. We expected them to be the ones telling us what we should all be doing. We do have doctors doing that. Dr Anthony Fauci, Dr Deborah Bricks. They're both brilliant people who have a lot of experience in this as well. But generally we don't think of the State Department or the National Institute for Allergies and Infectious Diseases as controlling outbreaks of disease. That's what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was

supposed to be. And I think that's where the disconnect is. And perhaps this touches on a much more broad question about when really the US government lost control of its ability to contain the spread of the virus. We don't fully know the answer to that, but I do think there are a couple of important things to consider. First of all, early on in January, the criteria for who

would actually be tested were fairly narrow. Um they were looking at people who were potentially exposed through travel too affected areas in China and who had symptoms. You know, if there were travel related cases that didn't, you know, fit those criteria, they might not have been tested. And I think I think we still don't know the answer to whether there were introductions in that period that we you know, that we just weren't aware of because we

weren't looking for them. I think it's an illusion that we ever had control over this virus. At all. I don't think that we know definitively when it first arrived in the US. I don't think that we know how it has spread since it arrived. And it all comes back down to not testing more broadly. You know, in the in the early weeks, you know, when this was primarily spreading overseas, most of the information in the United States about the outbreak, I think was coming directly from

the Centers for Disease Control. They were doing regular media briefings, and as it escalated in the United States, those briefings stopped and they were sort of replaced by these White House news conferences led by the President every day. But if you look at what the professionals of the CDC were saying back in February, they were saying that the United States needs to be prepared for a pandemic. They were warning that, you know, schools might close, that daily

life might be seriously disrupted. Um and those warnings turned out to be true. And they were saying these things, you know, when the politicians, uh and the President often weren't saying that publicly. And now you know, those voices are not the ones we're hearing from anymore. And I think, you know, for for a lot of people, that's that's concerning.

What is I think notable is that the agency that houses the most expertise within the US government that was um, you know, correct in its UM cautions or warnings UH weeks ago is is really not being hurt from in significant meaningful ways UM. And that affects uh, you know, everybody's ability to understand what's going on and make decisions based on it. I do think that they are having

that kind of an effect behind the scenes. I do think that they are sharing their expertise and giving advice and guidance to state and public health laboratories, to state and public health infection control workers. They're having phone calls with individual groups. So I do think that they are still having a major impact on how we're handling this virus. I just don't think that the American people are seeing

it the way we expected it. Do you think that this has permanently tarnished UM the CDC's reputation, both in terms of a response to a pandemic, but just in general is overall role in American health. I think that we definitely are going to have a different view of the CDC going forward, I'm not entirely sure if tarnished

is the right word. I think that the CDC themselves are saying that they don't feel like in this outbreak, where it is a national disaster across every level of our country, that it should be the c d C that is brought and center on that, and I do think that a lot of people expected that to be the case. So whether or not it's just a realignment of what the CDC's role should actually be, or whether

it's it's just a diminishment of their role. Also, when the next outbreak comes, certainly we hope that will be a little bit more prepared for that one and maybe it'll play out differently. That was Michelle Fake Cortes and John Tozzi discussing their interview with the CDC director. And that's it for the Prognosis Daily edition. For more on the pandemic from our bureaus around the world, visit Bloomberg

dot com, slash Coronavirus and One Small Favor. If you like what we're doing, please take a second to rate the podcast and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It helps more listeners find our global reporting. The Prognosis Daily Edition is hosted by Me Laura Carlson. The show is produced by Me Tophor Foreheads Jordan Gaspore and Magnus Hendrickson. Today's main story was reported by Michelle fay Cortes and John Tozzi. Original music by Leo citran.

Our editors are Francesca Levi and Rick Shine. Francesco Leviy is Bloomberg's head of podcasts. Thanks for listening.