CDC Director Robert Redfield’s congressional testimony on Sept. 23, 2020, immediately caught my attention. I watched in disbelief as Redfield told Congress that “more than 90 percent of the population”—more than three hundred million people in the United States—remains susceptible to the illness.
The statement was based on incomplete and outdated data, as well as an apparent lack of understanding of the literature, and it struck me as one of the most erroneous and fear-inducing proclamations of any public health official to that moment. Approximately two hundred thousand Americans had already died from COVID; the last thing the public needed was an exaggeration of the future risks, implying to some that ten times that number could still die.-- More...
