The Scientist Who Saw It Coming

Redfield’s Warning: What I Learned (But Couldn’t Tell You) Might Save Your Life
By Dr. Robert R. Redfield
(Skyhorse, 256 pages, $31)

Dr. Robert Redfield looked concerned. It was September 2020, and the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had just poked me in the neck and found my lymph node swollen like a rock. 

“Michael, I don’t want to alarm you, but you need to be examined right away,” Redfield warned me. “That could indicate cancer.”

Serving as an assistant secretary at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) during COVID, I spent a lot of time with Redfield and other public health leaders on the pandemic response. At times, Redfield and I disagreed; always, we were mutually respectful. I learned to listen to him closely. 

That day, I was rushed off to the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center where the chief surgeon removed my lymph node and confirmed it was head and neck cancer. My life quickly spiraled into treatment and recovery, and Redfield was along for the ride. 

I am alive because I listened to Dr. Redfield then, which is why I’m writing today. If our nation reads and heeds his new book (Redfield’s Warning: What I Learned [But Couldn’t Tell You] Might Save Your Life), millions of lives may be saved in the next pandemic. 

The good doctor’s warning: if our nation does not acknowledge what we did both right and wrong in the COVID response, we will make the same mistakes and more. And, according to Redfield, the next pandemic is coming, it will make COVID look like a head cold, and that means millions more dead Americans.

Redfield recites chapter and verse through the rights and wrongs of the U.S. pandemic response. His recitation is unvarnished, as he warns the reader in the opening pages. He is forthright in his critique of the Trump Administration’s initial response, but he holds his strongest criticism for the Biden team’s vaccine safety and efficacy claims and their controversial mandate.

His examples make his biggest concern clear as a bell: pandemic response leaders destroyed the reputation of our public health system, and Americans may ever trust that system again. 

In March 2020, President Donald Trump appointed me to straighten out what Redfield identifies as a vexing problem as COVID-19 kidnapped our country: public health communications. The federal government created confusion by first saying masks were useless (because we needed to preserve masks for healthcare workers) and then reversing the message weeks later to declare masks essential for all. Similarly, Redfield is convincing when he details the feds’ demand for six-foot social distancing as not based on science at all. 

Redfield strongly advocated three-foot distancing, which would have made it easier to keep schools open. But by March 2020, when I joined the COVID response team, more than a million American students were already banned from attending school. As Redfield predicted then and discusses in his book, the school closures caused immeasurable social and economic costs. 

The communications problem was made septic by rivalries among our top health leaders. Redfield reminds us more than once that HHS leaders were deeply divided. They sat together in COVID Task Force and Operation Warp Speed meetings, but there were strong disagreements. This sometimes complicated the crisis.

I got along well with all the players. They were my peers, by the deception of rank, but they were all giants in their fields. I learned to trust the deeply experienced and highly ethical Redfield more than any other scientist in the COVID response — especially as I watched him nearly burn his career down in defense of the truth. 

We know now that COVID originated in the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a Chinese research laboratory located near the first human cases of the virus. Americans were later astonished to learn that taxpayers provided HHS gain-of-function research grants that helped develop the human-to-human spread of the virus in the lab.

“There are men and women actually trying to teach these viruses how to infect human tissue because they believe that will allow them to find a vaccine,” Redfield writes. “That is just not smart.” This is research that will change the world “much more than the atom bomb.”

The first time I saw Redfield advocate the “lab leak theory,” shortly after I joined, the COVID Task Force meeting nearly erupted. Faces turned lava red; opponents of the theory loudly disagreed. The CDC director, a deeply respected, lifelong government scientist, had just told them to look in the mirror for the blame. And they weren’t having it. 

As a result, Redfield still suffers a quiet campaign to destroy his career today. And it’s this “scientific arrogance” that Redfield cautions us about the most. This woeful overconfidence led to COVID communications mistakes, damaging rivalries, and federal grants for prohibited research in Wuhan. But arrogance is also the new villain in Redfield’s Warning.

In a particularly disturbing passage of his book, the doctor who helped solve our nation’s AIDS crisis details how his global public health colleagues decided to publish results of 2010 US-funded gain-of-function research in the Netherlands on H5N1 bird flu, known to kill 60 percent of the people infected. What resulted was a public guide on how to make the deadly bird flu jump from human-to-human. 

Redfield loudly opposed that publication. With this data, he wrote, he could change the virus into a human scourge in a week. 

Basic public information proves Redfield is right. Bird flu is here, today it is much more deadly than COVID in humans, and arrogant scientists or bad actors will weaponize it soon. It’s only a matter of time. 

But we appear to have learned little from the last pandemic, he writes, so the next one may be unimaginably worse. 

Redfield’s advice: prepare. As our government provides the financial support for defense contractors to build planes and ammunition in peacetime, he advises the feds must fund biosecurity countermeasures more aggressively. Don’t just make one or two bird flu antivirals — make 10 or 20. Get the diagnostics, drugs, and medical devices ready now. It’s coming.

Like my cancer warning in 2020, Redfield is not trying to alarm us, but we must act now. We made mistakes in our COVID response, he writes, and we must begin by admitting it. Only then will our public health system begin to earn back trust and save lives. 

Mr. Caputo served as Assistant Secretary for Public affairs at HHS 2020-2021. A 40-year global political adviser, he has served Presidents Donald Trump, Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush.