Harvard Medical Prof. Calls Out CDC Director for Agency’s ‘Baffling’, ‘Muzzled’ Covid-19 Response: ‘If He Can’t Do It, He Should Step Aside’

Global health expert Dr. Ashish Jha publicly called out the Centers for Disease Control for its “baffling” and “muzzled” response to the Covid-19 response and demanded that its director, Dr. Robert Redfield step down if he is unable or unwilling to fix the agency’s failed leadership.

Jha’s pointed comments came during a Friday night appearance on The Rachel Maddow Show, and came in the wake of a highly critical op-ed that the Harvard medical professor published in StatNews earlier in the week entitled: “We need the real CDC back, and we need it now.”

“What is screwing things up at the CDC right now, at this time, when we need them the most? ” Maddow asked. “I feel like the CDC started to produce very non-CDC-like guidance, or lack of guidance, when it came to them investigating the meat plant outbreak in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. I’m worried that there’s something broken inside CDC which is why we’re not getting the kind of guidance that you say we really need.”

“This has been baffling to all of us in the public health world,” Jha said, of watching the CDC bungle its prestige and public trust. “I grew up as a public health person loving and admiring the CDC, arguing and believing that it is the best public health agency in the world. And the scientists are still there. But in this entire pandemic, it’s been one fiasco after another. And it’s either possible that all of scientists all of a sudden forgot their science, or there’s something at the leadership level that’s really hindering them.”

“My theory is, it is much more the latter,” Jha continued. “We’ve just seen it repeatedly. They messed up the testing. They haven’t collected the data. The guidance that you’ve been laying out has been mushy and often not evidence-based. And my sense is that the leadership in the CDC has been sidelined in a way that is really, really harmful to the American people.”

Maddow echoed Jha’s sidelined claim, and pointed out that the agency has all but disappeared from the federal government’s public response to the outbreak.

“Absolutely,” Jha replied.”I called up public health friends around the country and said ‘Look, if you want to have the number of Covid-19 cases in the U.S., where do you start?’ No one said the CDC. ‘If you want to find out how many hospitalizations there are for Covid, where do you go?’ No one said the CDC. The CDC has just been absent. And it isn’t because they all of a sudden forgot how to do all of this. There’s clearly been a decision to sideline the CDC, to make sure that they’re not collecting and presenting data to the American people. And it makes the work of all public health officials across the country much, much harder.”

Jha added that many of the critically needed experts remain at the CDC, but that repairing the agency’s broken functionality begins with fixing its leadership.

“The top scientists, they’re still there, so we don’t have to like bring them back,” Jha explained. “The bad news is that they’ve been muzzled. And they are not getting to do what they know how to do well. And we have to find a way to unmuzzle them. We have to find a way to let them do their job.”

“Ultimately, I think Dr. Redfield who was the appointed head of the CDC, I think he has to look himself in the mirror, and ask, is this the public health agency he wants to lead, in the greatest pandemic in a century?” Jha said, calling out the agency’s director by name. “And if he can’t do it, he should step aside, and make sure that somebody else can lead that agency, and help the American people get through this period.”

Watch the video above, via MSNBC.