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.
The White House has had a hard time choosing, vetting and retaining top appointees. After 16 months in office the President has fired or accepted the resignations of 23 top officials, including Redfield's predecessors, Dr. Thomas Frieden and Dr. Brenda Fitzgerald.
Six months later, Dr. Fitzgerald, then state health commissioner in Georgia, was appointed to lead the agency that protects Americans from epidemics, water contamination, cancer-causing compounds and hundreds of other health threats, at a salary of $197,000. Questions were immediately raised about her relationship with the Coca-Cola Corporation and their sponsorship, at her behest, of a Georgia anti-obesity campaign.
In September Fitzgerald made decisions in CDC's Atlanta headquarters involving $28.6 million worth of private contracts for electronic data-keeping relevant to opioid prescriptions. One of the companies receiving those grants was Greenway Health, in which Fitzgerald and her husband held stock worth $300,000. Senate queries led to a larger investigation and the discovery that she continued in December to hold stocks in pharmaceutical and medical management companies that posed clear conflict violations.
And on Jan. 30 she submitted her resignation, following a Politico disclosure that the Fitzgeralds owned tens of thousands of dollars' worth of tobacco stocks, some of which had been purchased after her CDC appointment.