Who’s on the U.S. Coronavirus Task Force
A longtime AIDS researcher, Dr. Robert R. Redfield has served since March 2018 as the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and administrator of the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry.
As such, he is the nation’s chief public health officer, overseeing government response to crises like the opioid epidemic or Ebola, and has had primary responsibility for supervising the federal response to the coronavirus cases in the United States, reporting to Mr. Azar.
Dr. Redfield has already been the target of criticism for some of the C.D.C.’s decisions — including testing protocols that may have missed infections, flawed testing kits for the virus and the repatriation of infected patients from the Diamond Princess cruise ship — although it is not clear whether his was the final word on these and related actions.
Before taking his post, Dr. Redfield was a professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, where he co-founded the Institute of Human Virology, and served as chief of infectious diseases. The institute provided treatment for H.I.V., the human immunodeficiency virus, to more than 6,000 patients in the Baltimore-Washington area and more than 1 million people in Africa and the Caribbean. Earlier in his research career, Dr. Redfield advocated broad testing for H.I.V. and the screening of military personnel for the virus — and faced renewed criticism for those views when he was nominated to the C.D.C. post.
A native of Chicago, Dr. Redfield grew up in Bethesda, Md., where both of his parents worked at the National Institutes of Health. He graduated from Georgetown University and its School of Medicine, and did his residency at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, then continued as a researcher there, focusing on AIDS. He launched the virology institute with Dr. Robert C. Gallo, who developed the blood test for H.I.V. in 1996.
— Sheila Kaplan
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/29/health/Trump-coronavirus-taskforce.html