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The health department’s politically appointed communications aides have demanded the right to review and seek changes to the CDC’s weekly scientific reports charting the progress of the coronavirus pandemic
Officials characterize these demands as an attempt to intimidate the reports’ authors and water down their communications to health professionals.
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 President Donald Trump's optimistic messages about the outbreak.
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, according to three people familiar with the exchanges.
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.
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
This includes efforts to adjust the reports to align with Trump's statements including the president's claims that fears about the outbreak are overstated, or even to 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 they claim wrongly inflated the risks of Covid-19
Caputo's team also has 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.
The report, which was held for about a month after Caputo’s team raised questions about its authors’ political leanings, was finally published last week. It said that "the potential benefits of these drugs do not outweigh their risks."
Ugh. There is a LOT in this article that will make your blood boil - especially Caputo's efforts to muzzle Dr. Fauci and stop CDC from warning about the risk of infection to children - because the Orange Messiah keeps tweeting about how schools should open.
Depraved.
Depraved.
Here's the article's author @ddiamond with more details: https://twitter.com/ddiamond/status/1304607408317136896
