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Trump Officials Interfering with CDC's Vital COVID-19 Reports
Trump's Health and Human Science Department is censoring our CDC for unflattering SCIENCE.
The CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports (MMWR) are the most holy epidemiology texts. Because it is published by the CDC, the Trump administration thinks it should be able to censor international researchers who publish there to promote its political agenda.
The health department’s politically appointed communications aides have demanded the right to review and seek changes to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s weekly scientific reports charting the progress of the coronavirus pandemic, in what officials characterized as an attempt to intimidate the reports’ authors and water down their communications to health professionals.
The CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports are authored by career scientists and serve as the main vehicle for the agency to inform doctors, researchers and the general public about how Covid-19 is spreading and who is at risk. Such reports have historically been published with little fanfare and no political interference, said several longtime health department officials, and have been viewed as a cornerstone of the nation's public health work for decades.
Who's behind this heinous interference? Former Trump campaign staffer turned HHS Assistant Secretary Michael Caputo... a former media consultant for Putin! You can't make this up.
But since Michael Caputo, a former Trump campaign official with no medical or scientific background, was installed in April as the health department's new spokesperson, there have been substantial efforts to align the reports with Trump's statements, including the president's claims that fears about the outbreak are overstated, or stop the reports altogether.
Caputo and his team have attempted to add caveats to the CDC's findings, including an effort to retroactively change agency reports.... tried to halt the release of some CDC reports, including delaying a report that addressed how doctors were prescribing hydroxychloroquine, the malaria drug favored by Trump as a coronavirus treatment despite scant evidence.
Caputo also helped install CDC’s interim chief of staff last month, two individuals added, ensuring that Caputo himself would have more visibility....
MMWR censorship is full throated authoritarianism! This is propaganda over science. It is immoral, dangerous, and must be considered un-American. This is a whole new level beyond tampering with CDC's internal advisements. This is a deeper form of authoritarianism.
CDC officials have fought back against the most sweeping changes, but have increasingly agreed to allow the political officials to review the reports and, in a few cases, compromised on the wording.... The communications aides’ efforts to change the language in the CDC’s reports have been constant across the summer and continued as recently as Friday afternoon.
In one clash, an aide to Caputo berated CDC scientists for attempting to use the reports to "hurt the President" in an Aug. 8 email sent to CDC Director Robert Redfield and other officials that was widely circulated inside the department....
In some cases, emails from communications aides to CDC Director Robert Redfield and other senior officials openly complained that the agency’s reports would undermine Trump's optimistic messages about the outbreak...
Bombshell. They’re getting people killed doing this. That’s what this amounts to.