Trump officials interfered with CDC reports on
Covid-19
The politically appointed HHS
spokesperson and his team demanded and received the right to review CDC’s
scientific reports to health professionals.
Former Trump campaign official Michael Caputo and his team have
attempted to add caveats to the CDC's findings, including an effort to
retroactively change agency reports that they said wrongly inflated the risks
of Covid-19.
By DAN DIAMOND
09/11/2020 10:25 PM EDT
Updated: 09/12/2020 11:11 AM EDT
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.
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, according to emails reviewed by
POLITICO and three people familiar with the situation.
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.
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.
But since Michael Caputo, a
former Trump campaign official with no medical or scientific background,
was installed in April as
the Health and Human Services 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 that they said wrongly inflated the risks
of Covid-19 and should have made clear that Americans sickened by the virus may
have been infected because of their own behavior, according to the individuals
familiar with the situation and emails reviewed by POLITICO.
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."
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 and obtained
by POLITICO.
"CDC to me appears to
be writing hit pieces on the administration," appointee Paul Alexander
wrote, calling on Redfield to modify two already published reports that
Alexander claimed wrongly inflated the risks of coronavirus to children and
undermined Trump's push to reopen schools. "CDC tried to report as if once
kids get together, there will be spread and this will impact school re-opening
. . . Very misleading by CDC and shame on them. Their aim is clear."
Alexander
also called on Redfield to halt all future MMWR reports until the agency
modified its years-old publication process so he could personally review the
entire report prior to publication, rather than a brief synopsis. Alexander, an
assistant professor of health research at McMaster University near Toronto whom
Caputo recruited this spring to be his scientific adviser, added that CDC
needed to allow him to make line edits — and demanded an "immediate
stop" to the reports in the meantime.
"The reports must be
read by someone outside of CDC like myself, and we cannot allow the reporting
to go on as it has been, for it is outrageous. Its lunacy," Alexander told
Redfield and other officials. "Nothing to go out unless I read and agree
with the findings how they CDC, wrote it and I tweak it to ensure it is fair
and balanced and 'complete.'"
CDC officials have fought
the efforts to retroactively change reports but have increasingly allowed
Caputo and his team to review them before publication, according to the three
individuals with knowledge of the situation. Caputo also helped install CDC’s interim
chief of staff last month, two individuals added, ensuring that Caputo himself
would have more visibility into an agency that has often been at odds with HHS
political officials during the pandemic.
Asked by POLITICO about why
he and his team were demanding changes to CDC reports, Caputo praised Alexander
as "an Oxford-educated epidemiologist" who specializes "in
analyzing the work of other scientists," although he did not make him
available for an interview.
"Dr. Alexander advises
me on pandemic policy and he has been encouraged to share his opinions with
other scientists. Like all scientists, his advice is heard and taken or
rejected by his peers," Caputo said in a statement.
Caputo also said that HHS
was appropriately reviewing the CDC's reports. “Our intention is to make sure
that evidence, science-based data drives policy through this pandemic—not
ulterior deep state motives in the bowels of CDC," he said.
Caputo's team has spent
months clashing with scientific experts across the administration. Alexander
this week tried to muzzle infectious-disease
expert Anthony Fauci from speaking about the risks of the
coronavirus to children, and The Washington Post reported in July
that Alexander had criticized the CDC's methods and findings.
But public health experts
told POLITICO that they were particularly alarmed that the CDC's reports could
face political interference, praising the MMWRs as essential to fighting the
pandemic.
"It's
the go-to place for the public health community to get information that's
scientifically vetted," said Jennifer Kates, who leads the Kaiser Family
Foundation's global health work. In an interview with POLITICO, Kates rattled
off nearly a dozen examples of MMWR reports that she and other researchers have
relied on to determine how Covid-19 has spread and who's at highest risk,
including reports on how the virus has been transmitted in nursing homes, at
churches and among children.
"They're so important,
and CDC has done so many," Kates said.
The efforts to modify the
CDC reports began in earnest after a May report authored by senior CDC official
Anne Schuchat, which reviewed the spread of Covid-19 in the United States and
caused significant strife within the health department. HHS officials,
including Secretary Alex Azar, believed that Schuchat was implying that the
Trump administration moved too slowly to respond to the outbreak, said two
individuals familiar with the situation.
The HHS criticism was
mystifying to CDC officials, who believed that Schuchat was merely recounting
the state of affairs and not rendering judgment on the response, the
individuals familiar with the situation said. Schuchat has made few public
appearances since authoring the report.
CDC did not respond to a
request for comment about Schuchat’s report and the response within the
department.
The close
scrutiny continued across the summer with numerous flashpoints, the individuals
added, with Caputo and other HHS officials particularly bristling about a CDC
report that found the coronavirus spread among young attendees at an overnight
camp in Georgia. Caputo, Alexander and others claimed that the timing of the
August report was a deliberate effort to undermine the president's push on
children returning to schools in the fall.
Most recently, Alexander on
Friday asked CDC to change its definition of “pediatric population” for a
report on coronavirus-related deaths among young Americans slated for next
week, according to an email that Caputo shared with POLITICO.
“[D]esignating persons aged
18-20 as ‘pediatric’ by the CDC is misleading,” Alexander wrote, arguing that
the report needed to better distinguish between Americans of different ages.
“These are legal adults, albeit young.”
Caputo defended his team’s
interventions as necessary to the coronavirus response. “Buried in this good
[CDC] work are sometimes stories which seem to purposefully mislead and
undermine the President’s Covid response with what some scientists label as
poor scholarship — and others call politics disguised in science,” Caputo told
POLITICO.
The battles over delaying
or modifying the reports have weighed on CDC officials and been a distraction
in the middle of the pandemic response, said three individuals familiar with
the situation. "Dr. Redfield has pushed back on this," said one
individual. "These are scientifically driven articles. He's worked to
shake some of them loose."
Kates, the Kaiser Family
Foundation's global health expert, defended the CDC's process as rigorous and
said that there was no reason for politically appointed officials to review the
work of scientists. “MMWRs are famously known for being very clear about their
limitations as well as being clear for what they've found," she said.
Kates also said that the
CDC reports have played an essential role in combating epidemics for decades,
pointing to an MMWR posted in 1981 — the first published report on what became the
HIV epidemic.
“Physicians
recognized there was some kind of pattern and disseminated it around the
country and the world,” Kates said. “We can now see how important it was to
have that publication, in that moment.”
