If you want to know why the Director of the CDC is such an ostentatious Trump bootlicker, grinning like a jack-o-lantern as the president spouts gibberish to the nation in the middle of this crisis, wonder no more.
He’s a wingnut. A serious one. When he was nominated for the slot, there was a huge controversy over his pay which was outrageously high and he finally relented and took less. But that’s not the biggest problem. In fact, he’s the last guy who should be in charge of an epidemic:
Redfield’s early engagement with the AIDS epidemic in the US in the 1980s and 90s was controversial. As an Army major at Walter Reed Medical Institute, he designed policies for controlling the disease within the US military that involved placing infected personnel in quarantine and investigating their pasts to identify and track possible sexual partners. Soldiers were routinely discharged and left to die of AIDS, humiliated and jobless, often abandoned by their families.
In the 1980s Redfield worked closely with W. Shepherd Smith, Jr. and his Christian organization, Americans for a Sound AIDS/HIV Policy, or ASAP. The group maintained that AIDS was “God’s judgment” against homosexuals, spread in an America weakened by single-parent households and loss of family values.
Redfield wrote the introduction to a 1990 book, “Christians in the Age of AIDS,” co-written by Smith, in which he denounced distribution of sterile needles to drug users and condoms to sexually active adults, and described anti-discrimination programs as the efforts of “false prophets.”In the early 1990’s, ASAP and Redfield also backed H.R. 2788, a House bill sponsored by deeply conservative Rep. William Dannemeyer (R-California). It would have subjected people with HIV to testing, loss of professional licenses and would have effectively quarantined them. (The bill died in Congress.) In the 2000s, Redfield was a top advocate for the so-called “ABCs of AIDS” in Africa, pressing to prevent HIV infection through sexual abstinence, monogamy and the use of condoms only as a last resort.
In 1992, Redfield, then a colonel, was part of a Walter Reed team backing an AIDS vaccine called VaxSyn, manufactured by a Connecticut company, MicroGeneSys. Redfield claimed that a small clinical trial had shown VaxSyn to protect the immune systems of infected soldiers, limiting the worst outcomes of AIDS.
Because this was a clear exaggeration, the Army investigated Redfield, eventually concluding he had made an innocent mistake. Redfield continued to strongly support VaxSyn, pushing Congress to fund a $20 million clinical trial on HIV-positive men. But VaxSyn never worked, and no fine-tuning in its biochemistry could have made a difference.
Independent scientists showed that the MicroGeneSys compound targeted a part of the HIV virus that mutates so frequently that infected individuals’ bodies are filled with multiple forms, most of which VaxSyn could not affect.
[…]
Burned by the Fitzgerald mess, presumably the White House carefully vetted Redfield, a former Army colonel and a University of Maryland HIV clinician and virologist, before announcing his appointment in April. It is very hard to understand what accomplishments prompted the University of Maryland to consider Redfield worth $827,000 for 15 months.
But it is not hard to see why President Trump would see Redfield’s hardcore, right-wing credentials as a good fit. Giving this doctor such a prominent job at such ridiculous pay — even a lowered sum — is another example of the Trump administration’s willingness to place politics over sensible public policy
He prizes loyalty above all else. And you can see how much this guy worships him above all else. That’s all that matters:
I’m afraid I don’t trust this fellow, do you?