Dear friend,

Today I wrote to Dr. Robert Redfield, calling on him to resign as the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. I hope you will join me.

It was not a letter I wrote lightly. But with the events of the past few months, the decision to write it could not have been easier.

Millions of you come to EWG every year for our science-based advice and guides to healthier living. Like many other organizations, EWG has relied on the CDC for scientific research and data on critical questions pertaining to public health. To be clear, we have not always agreed with CDC’s scientific interpretations and guidance.

As news accounts and internal documents and emails have shown, Redfield has enabled the fundamental scientific mission and processes of the CDC to be subverted by partisan political motives whose overall intent is to downplay the severity of Covid-19 and rush people back to work, and kids back to school, before it is safe to do so for the health of the overall population.

We cannot allow the CDC to become yet another agency dedicated to protecting political interests instead of public health. Please join me today in calling on Redfield to resign immediately!

Every administration has the right to appoint whomever it sees fit to operate the machinery of government. But citizens are under no obligation to accept an operator like Redfield, who enables conspicuously dangerous advice to be issued in aid of electoral expediency by an agency that has been trusted around the world to provide scientific perspective and guidance, unfiltered by politics, on threats to public health.

And so by our reckoning, in these nightmarish pandemic times, it comes down to this: Either science goes, or Redfield goes.

Click here to learn more about my decision to write to the CDC, and then join EWG’s efforts to protect science.

Thanks for reading,

Ken Cook
President and CEO, EWG