Americans don’t trust public health institutions, the virologist who used to head the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says.  

“We have lost public trust, there’s no doubt about it, and it really harms public health in a big way,” Robert Redfield said Wednesday during an event at The Heritage Foundation, adding, “We’ve lost, I think, trust in science.”  

Redfield spoke alongside Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., and epidemiologist Martin Kulldorff at Heritage’s Capitol Hill headquarters for the event, “Restoring American Wellness.” Many of the panelists’ comments focused on why the public had lost faith in America’s health institutions, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic.  

The lines between public health institutions and politics became blurred during the pandemic, Kulldorff said.

The National Institutes of Health is a government research agency and “their role is not policy or public health policy,” he said.

Yet, Dr. Anthony Fauci, who directed the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for nearly four decades until 2022, became quite involved in health policy while an adviser to two presidents during the pandemic.  

NIH “should have focused on doing the studies to find out, for example, about genetic drugs, if they can help against COVID,” Kulldorff said. But instead, he added, Fauci “sort of took over that public health policy, which doesn’t make any sense.”  

Schools shouldn’t have been closed and lockdowns shouldn’t have been widespread, Kulldorff said, but the “biggest chunk of the infectious disease research money was controlled by Dr. Fauci, so he took a very active role about the pandemic policy.

“And then, of course, academics will be very hard-pressed to contradict him because their livelihood and their families’ livelihoods depended on Fauci,” the epidemiologist said.

Today, the nation’s health system is under threat because of a lack of diversity of opinion in a field that is meant to be “based on diversity of opinion,” Redfield said.  

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed some significant issues in America’s health care system that anew coalition led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is seeking to address.  

Kennedy, tapped by President-elect Donald Trump to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, which includes both the CDC and NIH, spent years raising concerns over the increase in chronic disease, obesity, and mental illness in America.  

NIH predicts that among “the population 50 years and older, the number with at least one chronic disease is estimated to increase by 99.5% from 71.522 million in 2020 to 142.66 million by 2050.”  

“We’re a sick country,” Redfield said at the Heritage event, adding that when he thinks back over his more than 50 years in medicine, he has watched as America “progressively built a disease system.” 

Instead of a health system, Americans “pay for illness,” Redfield said, adding: “As long as you’re sick, the system works. We need to flip the switch … so that we pay for wellness.”  

One of the “root causes” of the public health crisis is that doctors are “at the bottom of the treatment pyramid,” Johnson said.

Doctors “should be at the top,” he said, but are being “crushed by the agencies” in a third-party payer system in America.  

“We have taken the benefits of free market competition, consumerism, out of the health care system,” the Wisconsin Republican said.  

Change is necessary, Johnson said, yet it won’t come to America’s health care system until competition is restored. But, he said, competition won’t return so long as big insurance companies and the government pay for most Americans’ health care.  

“I couldn’t agree with the senator more,” Redfield said, adding that “we’ve got to put doctors back on top of making America healthy again.”

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