Robert Redfield, a longtime AIDs researcher, will be named the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Department of Health and Human Service Secretary Alex Azar announced Wednesday in a statement.
Redfield was the founding director of the Department of Retroviral Research within the U.S. Military's HIV Research Program, and retired after 20 years of service in the U.S. Army Medical Corps, according to the statement.
Following his military service, he cofounded the University of Maryland's Institute of Human Virology with Dr. William Blattner and Dr. Robert C. Gallo and served as the chief of infectious diseases and vice chair of medicine at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, according to Azar's statement.
"Dr. Redfield has dedicated his entire life to promoting public health and providing compassionate care to his patients, and we are proud to welcome him as director of the world's premier epidemiological agency," Azar said in the statement.
"Dr. Redfield's scientific and clinical background is peerless: As just one example, during his two-decade tenure at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, he made pioneering contributions to advance our understanding of HIV/AIDS. His more recent work running a treatment network in Baltimore for HIV and Hepatitis C patients also prepares him to hit the ground running on one of HHS and CDC’s top priorities, combating the opioid epidemic," he continued.
Redfield's nomination comes with some controversy. Kaiser Health News wrote that the U.S. Army acknowledged in 1994 some accuracy issues with HIV vaccine clinical trials led by Redfield, but concluded at the time that the data errors did not constitute misconduct.
One of Redfield's original whistleblowers, former Air Force Lt. Col. Craig Hendrix, told Kaiser Health News this week that he was still skeptical about Redfield's handling of the vaccine research and has decided to speak out publicly.
"Either he was egregiously sloppy with data or it was fabricated," Hendrix, a physician who is director of the division of clinical pharmacology at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, told Kaiser Health. "It was somewhere on that spectrum, both of which were serious and raised questions about his trustworthiness."
Original Trump administration appointee Dr. Brenda Fitzgerald resigned from the CDC in January after reports that she bought shares in a tobacco company, among other financial dealings that presented a conflict of interest with the agency, National Public Radio reported.
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