Young Congolese girls look at a poster explaining the symptoms of Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

CDC director says he pushed to keep U.S. experts in Ebola zone but was overruled

WASHINGTON — The director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Tuesday that he argued that American experts should stay in the outbreak zone of the latest Ebola epidemic but was overridden by others in the Trump administration because of security concerns.

“Those decisions are security decisions that really are outside the realm of my public health expertise,” said the director, Robert Redfield, who said he made a case to the Department of Health and Human Services about why public health experts should remain in the outbreak area but that, at the end of the day, his argument didn’t win out.