Behind the White House Effort to Pressure the C.D.C.
on School Openings
Documents
and interviews show how senior officials sought to play down the risks of
sending children back to the classroom, alarming public health experts.
WASHINGTON
— Top White House officials pressured the Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention this summer to play down the risk of sending children back to
school, a strikingly political intervention in one of the most sensitive public
health debates of the pandemic, according to documents and interviews with
current and former government officials.
As part of
their behind-the-scenes effort, White House officials also tried to circumvent
the C.D.C. in a search for alternate data showing that the pandemic was
weakening and posed little danger to children.
The
documents and interviews show how the White House spent weeks trying to press
public health professionals to fall in line with President Trump’s
election-year agenda of pushing to reopen schools and the economy as
quickly as possible. The president and his team have remained defiant in their demand for
schools to get back to normal, even as coronavirus cases have once again ticked
up, in some cases linked to school and college reopenings.
The effort included Dr. Deborah L. Birx, the White House’s
coronavirus response coordinator, and officials working for Vice President Mike
Pence, who led the task force. It left officials at the C.D.C., long considered
the world’s premier public health agency, alarmed at the degree of pressure
from the White House.
One
member of Mr. Pence’s staff said she was repeatedly asked by Marc Short, the
vice president’s chief of staff, to get the C.D.C. to produce more reports and
charts showing a decline in coronavirus cases among young people.
The
staff member, Olivia Troye, one of Mr. Pence’s top aides on the task force,
said she regretted being “complicit” in the effort. But she said she tried as
much as possible to shield the C.D.C. from the White House pressure, which she
saw as driven by the president’s determination to have schools open by the time
voters cast ballots.
“You’re
impacting people’s lives for whatever political agenda. You’re exchanging votes
for lives, and I have a serious problem with that,” said Ms. Troye, who left
the White House in August and has
begun speaking out publicly against Mr. Trump.
According
to Ms. Troye, Mr. Short dispatched other members of the vice president’s staff
to circumvent the C.D.C. in search of data he thought might better support the
White House’s position.
“I was appalled when I found out that Marc Short was tasking
more junior staff in the office of the vice president to develop charts” for
White House briefings, she said.
After
Ms. Troye went public this month, Mr. Short told MSNBC that she had a vendetta
against the president and that she left the White House because “the strain was
too much for her to do the job.”
Several former officials said that before one task force
briefing in late June, White House officials, including Ms. Troye, spoke to top
C.D.C. officers asking for data that could show the low risk of infection and
death for school-age children — “a snazzy, easy-to-read document,” one former
senior public health official recalled.
The
White House seized on a bar chart the C.D.C. distributed that week to other
agencies, which showed that 60 percent of coronavirus deaths were people over
the age of 75. Officials asked the C.D.C. to provide a new chart to show people
18 and under as a separate group — rather than including them as normal in an
under-25 category — in an effort to demonstrate that the risk for school-age
children was relatively low.
In another
instance, Dr. Birx took a direct role in an effort to push the C.D.C. to
incorporate work from a little-known agency inside the Department of Health and
Human Services, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.
The document worked on by the mental health agency struck a
different tone from the cautious approach being proposed by the C.D.C., warning
that school closures would have a long-term effect on the mental health of
children. It said that “very few reports of children being the primary source
of Covid-19 transmission among family members have emerged” and asserted that
children who were asymptomatic “are unlikely to spread the virus.”
In a July 19 email, Dr. Birx asked Dr. Robert R. Redfield, the C.D.C. director, to incorporate the document “as background in the introduction section” of the C.D.C. guidance.
An email sent by Dr. Deborah L. Birx, the White House coronavirus
response coordinator, to Dr. Robert R. Redfield, the head of the C.D.C., about
school reopening guidance. The New York Times has redacted the contact
information and names of other recipients on the exchange.
C.D.C.
scientists pointed out numerous errors in the document and raised concerns that
it appeared to minimize the risk of the coronavirus to school-age children,
according to an edited version of the document obtained by The New York Times.
The C.D.C. was successful in beating back some of the proposed changes, and the
line about asymptomatic children was not included in its final guidelines.
But the
gist of the mental health agency’s position — stressing the potential risks of
children not attending school — became
the introductory text of the final C.D.C.
policy, leaving some officials there dismayed.
Brian
Morgenstern, a White House spokesman, said the coronavirus task force brought
together public health officials “who offer different expertise and views on a
variety of issues” in setting policy.
“President
Trump relies on the advice of all of his top health officials who agree that it
is in the public health interest to safely reopen schools, and that the
relative risks posed by the virus to young people are outweighed by the risks
of keeping children out of school indefinitely,” Mr. Morgenstern said.
The
C.D.C. did not immediately provide a comment.
The
internal battle began in July, weeks after a group of C.D.C. career employees
began drafting what would become the agency’s guidance to assist parents in
making decisions about whether to send their children back to school. Mr. Trump
had publicly made his preference clear. “We
want to get them open quickly, beautifully, in the fall,” he said, adding that
“young people do extraordinarily well” in avoiding the disease.
One of the guidance documents the C.D.C. produced was a
“decision-making tool” urging parents to “consider the full spectrum of risks
involved in both in-person and virtual learning options,” according to a draft
reviewed by The Times that reflected the language later published by the C.D.C.
The
seven-page draft conceded that scientists were “still learning about how it
spreads, how it affects children and what role children may play in its
spread,” and that limited data suggested that children were less likely to get
the virus than adults.
At the same time, it warned of deaths caused by multisystem inflammatory syndrome and of some children being at increased risk of severe illness. It recommended that parents consider whether others in a household might be at increased risk.
D.C.’s
overly stringent recommendations. “The Dems think it would be bad for them
politically if U.S. schools open before the November Election, but it is
important for the children and families,” he said on Twitter. “May cut off funding if
not open!”
Hospitalizations
of children over the summer remained relatively low, and some outside
organizations were also advocating for schools to open, as long it could be
done safely. The American Academy of Pediatrics issued a statement that
policymakers “should start with a goal of having students physically present in
school,” though it warned that areas with high infection rates would not be
able to open safely.
More recently, data
compiled by the academy from recent months shows that
hospitalizations and deaths from the coronavirus have increased at a faster
rate in children and teenagers than among the general public.
A large
study from South Korea published in July showed that children
between the ages of 10 and 19 can
spread the virus at least as much as adults do. More data
from researchers called into question who was infecting whom.
The
perils for school districts that have tried to reopen have become clearer this
fall. At least one coronavirus case had
been reported in more than 100 school buildings and early childhood
centers in the New York City school system by the first day of limited
in-person instruction last week.
In the
weeks after Mr. Trump’s public statements, the administration was working to
counter the C.D.C.’s cautious position.
The
White House drafted materials that C.D.C. officials originally believed were
intended to be posted on the White House website, including an illustrated
slide presentation emphasizing the “high costs of keeping schools closed,”
while asserting that school-age children face minimal risks from the
coronavirus.
The C.D.C. raised objections to the presentation, and it was never published.
In
mid-July, after the C.D.C. had distributed its proposed guidance to the White
House and other health agencies, the agency received a formal rejection of its
work: a “non-concur” decision by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services
Administration, the agency that White House officials saw as a counterweight to
the C.D.C.’s position.
Officials at the mental health agency told the C.D.C. that there was “too much information” in the guidance, and that information was “presented in a negative way,” according to an email distributed to C.D.C. officials.
A portion of an email obtained by The Times that explains why the
Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration rejected language
proposed by the C.D.C.
“Our
message on this is that this is a recipe for schools to stay closed,” the
agency wrote.
The
agency had helped prepare a five-page document supportive of reopening schools,
the document that Dr. Birx sent to Dr. Redfield on July 19. It repeatedly
described children as being at low risk for being infected by or transmitting
the virus, even though the science on both aspects was far from settled.
By
then, the position by the mental health agency had been embraced by top White
House officials.
“It was
seen as an argument to open up the country by getting kids back in schools,”
Ms. Troye said.
Ms. Troye said she tried to blunt the political offensive against the C.D.C. scientists the best she could.
Dr. Deborah Birx, left, the White House coronavirus response
coordinator, tried to incorporate positive information in a C.D.C. report.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times
“It was
hard to walk away from that,” she said, “knowing that it was going to get even
harder for them after I left.”
After the C.D.C. scientists successfully managed to get some material they considered objectionable out of the document, the White House’s Office of Management and Budget cleared the C.D.C.’s guidance.
But then the White House abruptly reversed course, telling the
C.D.C. that it wanted to add, as a preamble to the guidance, language that the
mental health agency had worked on listing the benefits of sending children
back to school. That document, with some C.D.C. edits, was given a new title:
“The Importance of Reopening America’s Schools This Fall.”
On July
23, with hours to go before the new guidance was to be published, the White
House staff secretary further stunned C.D.C. officials by emailing the guidance
to a long list of top White House officials, asking for any “critical edits” by
1 p.m. The list included Mark Meadows, the chief of staff; Jared Kushner, the
president’s son-in-law and senior adviser; Larry Kudlow, the director of the
National Economic Council; and Stephen Miller, a White House policy adviser.
By the
time it was published, it contained information that C.D.C.
officials had objected to earlier in the week, suggesting in particular that
the coronavirus was less deadly to children than the seasonal flu.