Subpoenas are necessary’: House watchdog details extensive meddling with CDC Covid-19 reports
Quote:
The House panel probing the Trump administration's coronavirus response released new documents detailing political appointees’ extensive efforts to modify or scuttle scientific Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports, as it also ordered top Trump health officials to quickly provide documents.
Trump appointees attempted to “alter or block” at least 13 scientific reports on the coronavirus as outbreaks surged across the spring and summer, Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.), the chair of the House select subcommittee on coronavirus, wrote on Monday in a letter that was shared with POLITICO.
"Top political officials at [Health and Human Services] and [the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] not only tolerated these efforts, but in some cases aided them," Clyburn added in the letter to HHS Secretary Alex Azar and CDC Director Robert Redfield.
Clyburn issued subpoenas to Azar and Redfield, ordering them by Dec. 30 to produce "full and unredacted" documents that Clyburn said his panel has sought for months.
The panel’s probe into administration’s coronavirus response began in mid-September, shortly after a POLITICO story revealed how appointees meddled with the famed Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports, which are authored by career scientists and are typically free of political interference. In recent weeks, the panel released evidence alleging that Redfield ordered agency staff to delete an email that appeared to show political interference and that a political adviser repeatedly advocated a controversial “herd immunity” strategy regarded by most public health experts as reckless.
Clyburn's subcommittee on Monday produced dozens of new documents detailing how Trump appointees — including then-science adviser Paul Alexander, the department's top spokesperson Michael Caputo and other health department officials — worked to subvert the CDC's MMWR reports.
Among the MMWRs that were targeted for edits: reports on the use of masks, the spread of Covid-19 in children, the virus' transmission during an April 7 primary election in Milwaukee and other reports that were seen as politically sensitive.
The newly released documents further detailed appointees' extensive efforts to suppress and even write a rebuttal to planned reports on hydroxychloroquine, the malaria drug favored by President Donald Trump as a coronavirus treatment despite little evidence of its effectiveness.
The subcommittee also released documents showing how Alexander repeatedly petitioned Charlotte Kent, the MMWR editor-in-chief, to make changes to planned reports, such as an upcoming MMWR on the spread of Covid-19 at a Georgia summer camp amid a robust debate about whether it was safe to reopen schools in the fall. In a separate email chain, CDC career officials discussed how best to navigate the political pressures, and Kent ultimately sent Alexander an email seeking to placate him.
However, the Georgia summer camp report, which was released on July 31, still angered the health department’s Trump appointees, sparking another effort to author their own response that they believed would be more favorable to the president.
The documents released by Clyburn's panel also further shed light on interactions between Trump appointees and career health department officials as the outbreak worsened. In one exchange, a CDC official complaining about the "pattern of hostile and threatening behavior" from Caputo, the department's top spokesperson who was personally installed by the president
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21 Dec 2020, 8:04 pm
It’s gonna be awesome to see all these jerks start going to jail. 
for supporting trump. Because doing so is deplorable.
