Robert R. Redfield

His parents, Robert Ray Redfield (1923–1956, from Ogden) and Betty, née Gasvoda, were both scientists at the National Institutes of Health, where his father was a surgeon and cellular physiologist at the National Heart Institute; Redfield's career in medical research was influenced by this background.

His parents had another son and a daughter.

His father died when he was four years old.

Redfield attended Georgetown University, and at college worked in Columbia University laboratories where investigations focused on the involvement of retroviruses in human disease.

Robert Ray Redfield Jr. (born July 10, 1951) is an American virologist who served as the Director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Administrator of the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry from 2018 to 2021.

Robert Ray Redfield Jr. was born on July 10, 1951.

Redfield earned a Bachelor of Science from Georgetown University's College of Arts and Sciences in 1973.

He then attended Georgetown University School of Medicine and was awarded his Doctor of Medicine in 1977.

Redfield's medical residency was at Walter Reed Army Medical Center (WRAMC) in Washington, D.C., where he completed his postgraduate medical training and internships in internal medicine (1978–1980), as a U.S. Army officer.

In the early years of investigations into the AIDS pandemic in the 1980s, Redfield led research that demonstrated that the HIV retrovirus could be heterosexually transmitted.

He also developed the staging system now in use worldwide for the clinical assessment of HIV infection.

Under his clinical leadership at the University of Maryland the patient base grew from 200 patients to approximately 6,000 in Baltimore and Washington, D.C., and more than 1.3 million in African and Caribbean nations.

His clinical research team won over $600 million in research funding.

Redfield completed clinical and research fellowships at WRAMC, in infectious diseases and tropical medicine, by 1982.

Redfield continued as a U.S. Army physician and medical researcher at the WRAMC for the next decade, working in virology, immunology and clinical research.

He collaborated with teams at the forefront of AIDS research, publishing several papers and advocating for strategies to translate knowledge gained from clinical studies to the practical treatment of patients afflicted by chronic viral diseases.

Redfield retired from the Army in 1996 as a colonel.

In 1996, Redfield, his HIV research colleague Robert Gallo and viral epidemiologist William Blattner co-founded the Institute of Human Virology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.

It is a multidisciplinary research organization dedicated to developing research and treatment programs for chronic human viral infection and disease.

At the University of Maryland School of Medicine, Redfield served as a tenured professor of medicine and microbiology, chief of infectious disease, and vice chair of medicine.

Redfield is known for his contributions in this period — in clinical research, in particular, for research into the virology and therapeutic treatments of HIV infection and AIDS.

Redfield served as a member of the President's Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS from 2005 to 2009, and was appointed as chair of the International Subcommittee from 2006 to 2009.

He is a past member of the Office of AIDS Research Advisory Council at the National Institutes of Health, the Fogarty International Center Advisory Board at the National Institutes of Health, and the Advisory Anti-Infective Agent Committee of the Food and Drug Administration.

While holding this position, he was interviewed for the 2009 HIV/AIDS denialist film House of Numbers.

Scientists interviewed for the film complained afterward that their comments had been taken out of context and misrepresented, and that, unknown at the interview times, the film promoted pseudoscience.

Redfield became the Director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on March 26, 2018.

He was appointed to the post by President Donald Trump, after the president's first appointee, Brenda Fitzgerald, resigned in scandal.

His appointment was considered controversial; he was publicly opposed by the Center for Science in the Public Interest and Patty Murray, the ranking Democrat on the Senate health committee, but supported by Kathleen Kennedy Townsend and some advocates for AIDS patients.

In his inaugural address to the CDC, Redfield called the agency "science-based and data-driven, and that's why CDC has the credibility around the world that it has".

On January 8, 2020, Redfield was advised by the head of China's Center for Disease Control and Prevention that SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19) was probably contagious among humans.

Redfield did not warn the public at that time.

The first confirmed case of COVID-19 was discovered in the U.S. on January 20, 2020, while Redfield was serving as director of the CDC.

Redfield was a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force from its start on January 29, 2020.

On February 13, 2020, Redfield said that the "virus is probably with us beyond this season, beyond this year, and I think eventually the virus will find a foothold and we will get community-based transmission".

This contrasted with statements by President Trump, who, erroneously, told the public through most of February that the virus was under control.

During February 2020, the CDC's early coronavirus test malfunctioned nationwide.

Redfield reassured his fellow task force officials that the problem would be quickly solved, according to White House officials.

It took about three weeks to sort out the failed test kits, which may have been contaminated during their processing in a CDC lab.

Widespread COVID-19 testing in the United States was effectively stalled until February 28, when the faulty test was revised, and the days afterward, when the Food and Drug Administration began loosening rules that had restricted other labs from developing tests.

Later investigations by the Food and Drug Administration and the Department of Health and Human Services found that the CDC had violated its own protocols in developing the faulty test.