Dr. Robert Redfield, who headed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention during the second half of President Donald Trump’s presidency, has found new work in the private sector.
Redfield, who left the post alongside Trump in January, is now a strategic health and safety consultant for Big Ass Fans, a fan company in Lexington, Kentucky.
Big Ass Fans is pushing for a “clean air system,” which it says reduces coronavirus infection by 95% and kills 99.9% of pathogens.
Dr. Robert Redfield, who served as head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention under former President Donald Trump, is now a health and safety advisor for Big Ass fans
Big Ass Fan’s industrial “clean air system” uses ionic technology that some researchers fear will release ozone and other by-products
In a press release, Redfield highlights Big Ass Fans as a “leader in the design of airflow systems and making the places where we live, work and play safer.”
“Proper ventilation has an important role to play in mitigating the transmission of COVID-19 and other respiratory pathogens,” Redfield also said.
She follows the advisor to Trump’s coronavirus task force, Dr. Deborah Birx, in the air purification industry when she joined ActivePure last month.
For industrial or commercial spaces, Big Ass Fans says it uses ion disinfection technology, while it sells fan systems that use UV-C light for homes and businesses.
Kaiser Health News reported Monday on Redfield’s workload and noted that academic experts have analyzed Big Ass Fan’s “virus-killing” ion technology.
“There’s no other way to say it, it’s not fully proven whether these devices would work in a real environment,” University of Wisconsin-Madison chemistry professor Timothy Bertram told Kaiser Health News.
“When you’re given 99.999 percent, that’s a red flag for any scientist. We don’t know anything to this point,” he continued. “That’s just crazy.”
Bertram studied aerosol particles and, when he examined ion and hydroxyl-releasing devices, found that some emitted ozone, which can make asthma worse.
The Environmental Protection Agency also warned of the ability of bipolar ionization to generate ozone and other by-products when used indoors.
“Anything that really destroys a virus can also produce another chemistry,” said Delphine Farmer, an associate professor at Colorado State University who specializes in atmospheric and indoor chemistry at Kaiser Health News.
William Bahnfleth, a professor of architectural engineering at Penn State, who studies indoor air quality and heads the American Society of Heating, Cooling, and Air Conditioning Engineers, the team working on the epidemic, went tell Kaiser that Big Ass Fans have made a good faith effort to study their systems than their rivals, but studies so far have been incomplete.
This is because the company has not measured possible gaseous by-products.
Brent Stephens, an indoor air quality expert who heads the civil, architectural and environmental engineering department at the Illinois Institute of Technology, echoed that sentiment in Kaiser.
“They are still not doing anything to address the possible adverse impacts of exposure to chemical by-products,” he told the health services.
He said the test spaces that have been used (which do not include people or furniture) will not produce accurate real-world results.
Bertram also said that no system he studied worked better than a HEPA filter, which is the standard recommendation, along with a MERV-13 filter in a heating system and increased outdoor ventilation.
A spokesman for Big Ass Fans, Alex Risen, told Kaiser that ionization technology does not emit ozone or other by-products and does not “put bad things in the lungs.”
Risen said the ions occur naturally.
“We know we don’t produce any negative products,” he said. “We know that on the connections you’re on, you won’t get any negative effects.”
Redfield made headlines last month when he sat down with CNN’s Sanjay Gupta for the network’s documentary on coronavirus doctors and said he believed COVID-19 originated in a Chinese lab.
“I am of the view that I still believe the most likely etiology of this pathogen in Wuhan came from a laboratory,” Redfield said. “The rest don’t believe it.” That’s all right. Science will finally find out.