Speaker 1: Welcome to Prognosis. I'm Laura Carlson. It's day thirty three
Speaker 1: since coronavirus was declared a global pandemic. Our main story today. Historically,
Speaker 1: the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is the
Speaker 1: agency in charge of predicting and containing an outbreak, but
Speaker 1: as COVID nineteen ravages the country, the agency has taken
Speaker 1: a back seat to the White House. CDC director Robert
Speaker 1: Redfield talked to Bloomberg about the agency's changing role and
Speaker 1: its missteps early on in the crisis. But first, here's
Speaker 1: what happened today. Talk is increasingly turning to how and
Speaker 1: when the US can restart its economy and what a
Speaker 1: rebooted economy would look like. Dr Anthony Faucci, the top
Speaker 1: infectious disease expert in the US, said Monday that parts
Speaker 1: of the US could be ready to ease up on
Speaker 1: coronavirus related restrictions in May, but Faucci and many others
Speaker 1: say that would depend on widespread testing becoming available. Faucci
Speaker 1: also said the US could see a second wave of
Speaker 1: the virus in November. The likelihood that the outbreak will
Speaker 1: keep coming and going in cycles has Neil Cash Kari,
Speaker 1: president of the Minneapolis Federal Reserve, predicting eighteen months of
Speaker 1: rolling shutdowns. Cash Cary said on CBS's Face the Nation
Speaker 1: that without a vaccine or therapy for COVID nineteen, we
Speaker 1: will continue to have to reimpose and then ease social
Speaker 1: distancing restrictions to keep the virus contained. About that vaccine,
Speaker 1: the World Health Organization has said there are seventy coronavirus
Speaker 1: vaccines in development around the world. Three of them are
Speaker 1: already being tested in human trials. Hong Kong company Cancino
Speaker 1: Biologics and Beijing's Institute of Biotechnology have the two drugs
Speaker 1: that are farthest along in the pipeline. Scientists are working
Speaker 1: at an unprecedented speed to get a vaccine to market
Speaker 1: in the next year to eighteen months. It's a process
Speaker 1: that usually takes ten or fifteen years, and the Centers
Speaker 1: for Disease Controlled Director Robert Redfield said in recent interviews
Speaker 1: that the coronavirus has stabilized across the US and he
Speaker 1: thinks the country is close to a peak in cases,
Speaker 1: but the US still leads the world in new cases,
Speaker 1: and New York reported its death toll shot past ten
Speaker 1: thousand over the Easter weekend. Now for our main story,
Speaker 1: what happened at the CDC. We've traditionally thought of the
Speaker 1: CDC as being the agency in charge of detecting and
Speaker 1: tamping down outbreaks of disease. But when it comes to coronavirus,
Speaker 1: they have been criticized for getting off to a late
Speaker 1: inadequate start with testing, and the agency has not been
Speaker 1: the public face of the disease response. They've largely taken
Speaker 1: a back seat to the White House and its task force.
Speaker 1: I recently had the chance to speak with Bloomberg reporters
Speaker 1: Michelle fake Cortez and John Tozzi. They interviewed Robert Redfield
Speaker 1: for over an hour about the CDC's response to the pandemic.
Speaker 1: To start off, I asked Michelle to tell a bit
Speaker 1: about the overall history and mission of the agency. The
Speaker 1: CDC has been viewed as the gold standard worldwide when
Speaker 1: it comes to controlling infectious disease. Is even in China.
Speaker 1: Their agency there is known as the Chinese CDC, and
Speaker 1: everybody has looked to the US to control these sorts
Speaker 1: of outbreaks and to understand what's happening on the in
Speaker 1: the world. The CDC researchers and staff members have actually
Speaker 1: been the ones who have trained many of the people
Speaker 1: worldwide who handle infectious disease outbreaks. So in the United States,
Speaker 1: all of our politicians are leaders public health officials across
Speaker 1: the entire country. Really thought that the CDC was the
Speaker 1: premier institution that would be directing the entire way that
Speaker 1: the government is going to respond. And the CDC director
Speaker 1: is Robert Redfield. Tell me about it. Robert Redfield is
Speaker 1: absolutely a renowned virologist in America. It's amazing because he
Speaker 1: is probably one of the people who are most ideally
Speaker 1: situated to be attacking this situation head on. He served
Speaker 1: for twenty years and the U. S. Army Medical Corps.
Speaker 1: He was a founding director of the Department of Retroviral Research,
Speaker 1: which was part of the military's HIV research program. After
Speaker 1: he retired from that position, he founded the Institute of
Speaker 1: Human Virology at the University of Maryland. He knows what
Speaker 1: he's talking about when it comes to viruses in virology,
Speaker 1: and he knows how to handle terrifying, unexpected new outbreaks
Speaker 1: of disease. So the CDC is led by this renowned expert,
Speaker 1: and the country was counting on them to manage the
Speaker 1: coronavirus response, but there have been a lot of mistakes
Speaker 1: made by the CDC, particularly around testing John what happened there.
Speaker 1: I think from the kind of early weeks of the
Speaker 1: outbreak in the United States, there was a sense that
Speaker 1: we did not have enough tests or fast enough tests
Speaker 1: to really detect the virus as it was, you know,
Speaker 1: maybe spreading silently in some communities. The CDC developed the
Speaker 1: first test in the United States, but when it sent
Speaker 1: that test to state public health labs, it didn't work
Speaker 1: and that set set the whole country back for a
Speaker 1: couple of CREWFI weeks. YouTube interviewed Robert Redfield about all this.
Speaker 1: What is his opinion of how the agency has performed,
Speaker 1: particularly when it comes to coordinating public response to the outbreak.
Speaker 1: Redfield defended how the CDC responded to the outbreak, and
Speaker 1: he said that a lot of the kind of narratives
Speaker 1: out there about the agency were incorrect. He said that
Speaker 1: the CDC is still the premier public health agency in
Speaker 1: the world, and he thought that the the agency would
Speaker 1: actually come out of this with its with its reputation
Speaker 1: and its capabilities enhanced um and specifically on the question
Speaker 1: of testing. He said that the CDC did its job,
Speaker 1: that it developed an initial test quick really once the
Speaker 1: genetic sequence of the virus was available. They had a
Speaker 1: test that worked at the CDC headquarters in a week
Speaker 1: or just over a week, and that you know there
Speaker 1: was a failure when you know, there was a problem
Speaker 1: when the that test was sent to state public health labs.
Speaker 1: That took a couple of weeks to correct. UM. But
Speaker 1: the question more of more broad testing capacity in hospitals,
Speaker 1: in commercial labs. Um, you know, the ability of people
Speaker 1: who think they are sick or think they might have
Speaker 1: the virus to actually find out on a broad scale.
Speaker 1: He essentially said that that's not the responsibility of the
Speaker 1: Centers for Disease Control, that that's the responsibility of uh,
Speaker 1: you know, the healthcare industry and the clinical laboratories in
Speaker 1: the United States. I think that that's exactly where the
Speaker 1: rub is here. The thing is is that Americans expected
Speaker 1: the CDC to be front and center. We expected them
Speaker 1: to be the ones telling us what we should all
Speaker 1: be doing. We do have doctors doing that. Dr Anthony Fauci,
Speaker 1: Dr Deborah Bricks. They're both brilliant people who have a
Speaker 1: lot of experience in this as well. But generally we
Speaker 1: don't think of the State Department or the National Institute
Speaker 1: for Allergies and Infectious Diseases as controlling outbreaks of disease.
Speaker 1: That's what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was
Speaker 1: supposed to be. And I think that's where the disconnect is.
Speaker 1: And perhaps this touches on a much more broad question
Speaker 1: about when really the US government lost control of its
Speaker 1: ability to contain the spread of the virus. We don't
Speaker 1: fully know the answer to that, but I do think
Speaker 1: there are a couple of important things to consider. First
Speaker 1: of all, early on in January, the criteria for who
Speaker 1: would actually be tested were fairly narrow. Um they were
Speaker 1: looking at people who were potentially exposed through travel too
Speaker 1: affected areas in China and who had symptoms. You know,
Speaker 1: if there were travel related cases that didn't, you know,
Speaker 1: fit those criteria, they might not have been tested. And
Speaker 1: I think I think we still don't know the answer
Speaker 1: to whether there were introductions in that period that we
Speaker 1: you know, that we just weren't aware of because we
Speaker 1: weren't looking for them. I think it's an illusion that
Speaker 1: we ever had control over this virus. At all. I
Speaker 1: don't think that we know definitively when it first arrived
Speaker 1: in the US. I don't think that we know how
Speaker 1: it has spread since it arrived. And it all comes
Speaker 1: back down to not testing more broadly. You know, in
Speaker 1: the in the early weeks, you know, when this was
Speaker 1: primarily spreading overseas, most of the information in the United
Speaker 1: States about the outbreak, I think was coming directly from
Speaker 1: the Centers for Disease Control. They were doing regular media briefings,
Speaker 1: and as it escalated in the United States, those briefings
Speaker 1: stopped and they were sort of replaced by these White
Speaker 1: House news conferences led by the President every day. But
Speaker 1: if you look at what the professionals of the CDC
Speaker 1: were saying back in February, they were saying that the
Speaker 1: United States needs to be prepared for a pandemic. They
Speaker 1: were warning that, you know, schools might close, that daily
Speaker 1: life might be seriously disrupted. Um and those warnings turned
Speaker 1: out to be true. And they were saying these things,
Speaker 1: you know, when the politicians, uh and the President often
Speaker 1: weren't saying that publicly. And now you know, those voices
Speaker 1: are not the ones we're hearing from anymore. And I think,
Speaker 1: you know, for for a lot of people, that's that's concerning.
Speaker 1: What is I think notable is that the agency that
Speaker 1: houses the most expertise within the US government that was um,
Speaker 1: you know, correct in its UM cautions or warnings UH
Speaker 1: weeks ago is is really not being hurt from in
Speaker 1: significant meaningful ways UM. And that affects uh, you know,
Speaker 1: everybody's ability to understand what's going on and make decisions
Speaker 1: based on it. I do think that they are having
Speaker 1: that kind of an effect behind the scenes. I do
Speaker 1: think that they are sharing their expertise and giving advice
Speaker 1: and guidance to state and public health laboratories, to state
Speaker 1: and public health infection control workers. They're having phone calls
Speaker 1: with individual groups. So I do think that they are
Speaker 1: still having a major impact on how we're handling this virus.
Speaker 1: I just don't think that the American people are seeing
Speaker 1: it the way we expected it. Do you think that
Speaker 1: this has permanently tarnished UM the CDC's reputation, both in
Speaker 1: terms of a response to a pandemic, but just in
Speaker 1: general is overall role in American health. I think that
Speaker 1: we definitely are going to have a different view of
Speaker 1: the CDC going forward, I'm not entirely sure if tarnished
Speaker 1: is the right word. I think that the CDC themselves
Speaker 1: are saying that they don't feel like in this outbreak,
Speaker 1: where it is a national disaster across every level of
Speaker 1: our country, that it should be the c d C
Speaker 1: that is brought and center on that, and I do
Speaker 1: think that a lot of people expected that to be
Speaker 1: the case. So whether or not it's just a realignment
Speaker 1: of what the CDC's role should actually be, or whether
Speaker 1: it's it's just a diminishment of their role. Also, when
Speaker 1: the next outbreak comes, certainly we hope that will be
Speaker 1: a little bit more prepared for that one and maybe
Speaker 1: it'll play out differently. That was Michelle Fake Cortes and
Speaker 1: John Tozzi discussing their interview with the CDC director. And
Speaker 1: that's it for the Prognosis Daily edition. For more on
Speaker 1: the pandemic from our bureaus around the world, visit Bloomberg
Speaker 1: dot com, slash Coronavirus and One Small Favor. If you
Speaker 1: like what we're doing, please take a second to rate
Speaker 1: the podcast and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts
Speaker 1: or Spotify. It helps more listeners find our global reporting.
Speaker 1: The Prognosis Daily Edition is hosted by Me Laura Carlson.
Speaker 1: The show is produced by Me Tophor Foreheads Jordan Gaspore
Speaker 1: and Magnus Hendrickson. Today's main story was reported by Michelle
Speaker 1: fay Cortes and John Tozzi. Original music by Leo citran.
Speaker 1: Our editors are Francesca Levi and Rick Shine. Francesco Leviy
Speaker 1: is Bloomberg's head of podcasts. Thanks for listening.