Kevin McCarthy Says He Trusts Trump Over CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield on Coronavirus Vaccine

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) told a reporter that if he has to “take the words” of either the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) or President Donald Trump on the coronavirus vaccine, “the president’s right.”

During a Q&A on Thursday, a reporter asked McCarthy, “Who do you trust on Covid science,” CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield, “or the president?”

“I will tell you this. I spent time yesterday with Dr. Slaoui, the chief scientific adviser. Very, very impressed with Secretary Azar as well,” McCarthy responded. “Dr. Slaoui has done fourteen vaccines, he’s probably the premier individual in the entire world. We’re going to have a safe an effective vaccine this year, and listen to the preparation of what we’ve been able to do with Operation Warp Speed, to be able to deliver it when that time comes.”

“If I just take the words of the CDC and the president, the president’s right,” he declared.

The reporter pushed, “But there’s mixed messages coming from this administration. You have Dr. Redfield on the one hand saying one thing about the virus timeline or the vaccine timeline, and you have the president undercutting him. So who are Americans to trust?”

McCarthy replied, “You say Redfield said one thing, the president said the other. What I think has happened here, because of Operation Warp Speed things are moving so quickly that we’re able to do things that we haven’t done before.”

“I think one of those two individuals had more information than the other, and that was the president, so what you should do is actually ask the question to Dr. Slaoui, who’s in charge of this, who is the adviser to what’s happening, who’s working every single day with the eight companies that are building the vaccine,” he said, adding, “I watched a CEO of Pfizer tell the public — not government — that he thinks this is going so well they may even have it and gave you a date in October.”

“Now they are the ones who are building it right now, so I would probably go to the source. I don’t blame Dr. Redfield, he just was not updated. I think he probably needs to be updated,” McCarthy concluded.

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