Trump's CDC head Dr. Robert Redfield jumps to Big A** Fans as a health and safety adviser as company tries to sell 'virus-killing' air filtration technology

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Dr. Robert Redfield, who ran 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 office alongside Trump in January, is now a strategic health and safety adviser for Big Ass Fans, a Lexington, Kentucky-based fan company. 

Big Ass Fans is pushing a 'Clean Air System' that it says reduces coronavirus infection by 95 per cent -  and kills 99.9 per cent of pathogens. 

Dr. Robert Redfield, who served as the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention under former President Donald Trump, is now a health and safety adviser for Big Ass Fans 

Big Ass Fan's industrial 'Clean Air System' uses ion technology that some researchers fear releases ozone and other byproducts 

In a press release, Redfield touts Big Ass Fans as a 'leader in designing airflow systems and making places where we live, work, and play, safer.' 

'Proper ventilation has a major role to play in mitigating transmission of COVID-19 and other respiratory pathogens,' Redfield also said.  

He follows Trump's coronavirus taskforce adviser, Dr. Deborah Birx, to the air purifying sector, as she joined the company 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 on Redfield's job move Monday, pointing out that academic experts have scrutinized Big Ass Fan's 'virus-killing' ion technology.  

'There's no other way to say it- it's completely unproven whether these devices would work in a real-world setting,' University of Wisconsin-Madison chemistry professor Timothy Bertram told Kaiser Health News. 

'When they give you 99.999 per cent, that's a red flag to any scientist. We don't know anything to that degree,' he continued. 'That's just nuts.'  

Bertram studies aerosol particles and when he looked at ion and hydroxyl-releasing devices he found that some emitted ozone, which can make asthma worse. 

The Environmental Protection Agency also warned of bipolar ionization's ability to generate ozone and other byproducts when being used indoors. 

'Anything that actually destroys a virus is potentially doing other chemistry as well,' pointed out Delphine Farmer, a Colorado State University associate professor who specializes in atmospheric and indoor chemistry to Kaiser Health News.   

William Bahnfleth, an architectural engineering professor at Penn State who studies indoor air quality and leads the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers Epidemic Task Force, told Kaiser that Big Ass Fans has made more of a good faith effort to study its systems than its rivals, but the studies, so far, have been incomplete. 

That's because the company hasn't measured potential gaseous byproducts. 

Brent Stephens, an indoor air quality expert who leads the civil, architectural and environmental engineering department at the Illinois Institute of Technology, echoed that sentiment to Kaiser. 

'They still do nothing to address potential adverse impacts of chemical byproduct exposure,' he told the health wire service.   

He said the testing spaces that have been used - that include no people or furniture - won't produce accurate, real-world results. 

Bertram also said that no system he studied fared better than a HEPA filter, which is the standard recommendation, alongside a MERV-13 filter in a heating system and increased outside ventilation. 

A spokesman for Big Ass Fans, Alex Risen, told Kaiser that the ionization technology does not emit ozone or other byproducts and isn't 'putting bad things into your lungs.' 

Risen said that ions occur naturally. 

'We know that we're not producing any negative products,' he said. 'We know that at the concnetrations that you're at, you're not getting negative effects.'  

Redfield made headlines last month when he sat down with CNN's Sanjay Gupta for the network's documentary on the coronavirus doctors and said he believed COVID-19 originated in a Chinese lab. 

'I am of the point of view that I still think the most likely etiology of this pathogen in Wuhan was from a laboratory, escaped,' Redfield said. 'The other people don’t believe that. That’s fine. Science will eventually figure it out.'