Vice President Overruled CDC Scientists on Border Closure

The Associated Press reported that in March of 2020, Vice President Mike Pence ordered the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Robert Redfield to utilize the authority granted to the CDC under the Public Health Services Act to take “extraordinary measures to limit transmission of an infectious disease" to close U.S. borders.

In early March, White House officials called on lawyers at the CDC’s parent agency, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), to pressure Redfield into adopting the order, though Redfield was initially resistant. Redfield and other CDC scientists reportedly argued that there was no evidence that the border closure would slow the spread of the disease. Pence and members of his staff called Redfield directly to demand the order be adopted. Lawyers from the HHS then drafted the order  and submitted it to Redfield who signed it. Pence justified the move as a mitigation effort to help curb the spread of the coronavirus, specifically from those travelling internationally, but CDC scientists disagreed. 

The administration had already implemented a ban on nonessential travel. While that ban was supported by most public health experts, many saw Pence’s order as politically motivated and an inappropriate use of public health authority. Dr. Anthony So, a public health expert at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told reporters that “[t]he decision to halt asylum processes ‘to protect the public health’ is not based on evidence or science” and commented that Pence’s order “directly endangers tens of thousands of lives and threatens to amplify dangerous anti-immigrant sentiment and xenophobia.” Pence’s spokeswoman Katie Miller said that “Vice President Pence never directed the CDC on this issue.”