WASHINGTON — The director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Tuesday that he argued that American experts should stay in the outbreak zone of the latest Ebola epidemic but was overridden by others in the Trump administration because of security concerns.
“Those decisions are security decisions that really are outside the realm of my public health expertise,” said the director, Robert Redfield, who said he made a case to the Department of Health and Human Services about why public health experts should remain in the outbreak area but that, at the end of the day, his argument didn’t win out.
The CDC was forced to withdraw workers from the outbreak zone in the Democratic Republic of Congo several weeks ago amid security concerns. It’s unclear whether officials at HHS, which oversees the CDC, pushed for the Ebola experts to remain. But sources told STAT earlier this month that the State Department recommended they be withdrawn.
Trump and his people are just cowardly. We need to be keeping an eye on this kind of outbreak. There’s no good reason to be intentionally blindsided.
This is despicable!