Maddow Rips Trump CDC Chief After Agency Review Drops: ’Participated in the Corrupting Efforts’ That Disgraced CDC and Never Resigned

Rachel Maddow called out Robert Redfield, the CDC chief under Donald Trump, after a new report about outside influence on the agency was released Monday.

Maddow opened her show talking about the CDC review that found some Trump-era documents that were “not primarily authored” by the CDC on pandemic recommendations, including guidelines about reopening early last year.

“This Trump nonsense went out as if it was CDC guidance. It’s like if you ordered food from a super-fancy, fantastic restaurant with an amazing reputation, but I stole the food and instead dropped off some terrible frozen pizza at your house,” she said.

Maddow told viewers the Trump White House was “stealing the CDC’s good name” to push Trump’s “weird ideas about covid,” and that hurt the reputation of the CDC at a critical time.

She said the politicization of the CDC under Trump “still raises my blood pressure,” recalled what she said about the subject six months ago, and went through how the review was released Monday with little fanfare.

“They are restoring integrity,” Maddow said. “How do you get your reputation back? In part by owning up to the stuff that was done inappropriately, naming it, removing it, making sure it doesn’t happen again.”

She then brought up Redfield and said she can’t get over why he “never quit in protest of what they did to the agency he was supposedly running.”

“But that will be what he lives with as his reputation and what he did to public health in America and in the world under his leadership, while he let all that happen and he participated in the corrupting efforts that disgraced the CDC at that critical time.”

You can watch above, via MSNBC.