Tag: Trump CDC

CDC director allegedly ordered deletion of email showing effort to interfere with coronavirus guidance, lawmaker says

Washington Post logo

The director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention allegedly ordered the destruction of an email written by a top Trump administration health official who was seeking changes in a scientific report on the coronavirus’s risk to children, the head of a congressional oversight subcommittee charged Thursday.

In a letter to CDC Director Robert R. Redfield and his superior, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, Rep. James E. Clyburn (D-S.C.) expressed “serious concern about what may be deliberate efforts by the Trump Administration to conceal and destroy evidence that senior political appointees interfered with career officials’ response to the coronavirus crisis at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.”

The report was not altered or withdrawn. But Clyburn, chairman of the House select subcommittee on the coronavirus crisis, cited an interview three days ago with the editor of the CDC’s most authoritative publication, the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, known as MMWR. Charlotte Kent, editor in chief of that report, told investigators that while on vacation in August, she received instructions to delete the email written by Paul Alexander, a senior adviser to Azar. Continue reading.

Former CDC head rips Trump’s CDC chief in private letter: ‘It is a slaughter not a political dispute’

AlterNet logo

In a scathing letter sent late last month as coronavirus cases and deaths surged across the United States, renowned epidemiologist and former CDC chief Dr. William Foege called on the agency’s current director to publicly speak out about the Trump administration’s catastrophic failure to combat the pandemic and apologize for caving to the White House’s influence—even if it means risking his job.

“You could upfront, acknowledge the tragedy of responding poorly, apologize for what has happened and your role in acquiescing, set a course for how CDC would now lead the country if there was no political interference, give them the ability to report such interference to a neutral ombudsman, and assure them that you will defend their attempts to save this country,” Foege wrote in a September 23 letter (pdf) to Dr. Robert Redfield, who was appointed by President Donald Trump.

“Don’t shy away from the fact this has been an unacceptable toll on our country,” the former CDC head added in the letter, which was published late Tuesday by USA Today. “It is a slaughter and not just a political dispute.” Continue reading.

No matter what the CDC says, here’s why many scientists think the coronavirus is airborne.

Washington Post logo

“To the general public, ‘airborne’ can evoke fear and panic. People think of the movie ‘Contagion,’ which is like ‘Jaws’ but for infectious diseases.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Monday removed language from its website that said the novel coronavirus spreads via airborne transmission, the latest example of the agency backtracking from its own guidance.

The agency said the guidance, which went up on Friday and largely went without notice until late Sunday, should not have been posted because it was an early draft.

“Unfortunately an early draft of a revision went up without any technical review,” said Jay Butler, the CDC’s deputy director for infectious diseases. “We are returning to the earlier version and revisiting that process. It was a failure of process at CDC.” Continue reading.

Public Outrage Forces CDC To Restore Hospital Data On Website

Hospitalizations for COVID-19 have been seen as a key metric of both the coronavirus’s toll and the health care system’s ability to deal with it. Recent federal actions may strike a blow to the public’s ability to track them.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention removed from its website, and then restored, data on hospital capacity across the country to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic. But in a note, the agency indicated that the data may no longer be updated because of a change in federal reporting requirements to hospitals.

On Wednesday, ProPublica noticed that the CDC’s website had stopped displaying hospital capacity information, which was seen as a good barometer of whether hospitals in certain states had enough beds to deal with surges in COVID-19 cases. The data showed that more than 70 percent of intensive care unit beds in some states, including Texas and Arizona, were filled. That had been viewed by some experts as a benchmark for safely reopening businesses. Continue reading.

Who took down the CDC’s coronavirus data? The agency itself.

Alarm over the missing data, which was restored Thursday, became the latest source of tension between the CDC and administration officials.

After the Trump administration ordered hospitals to change how they report coronavirus data to the government, effectively bypassing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, officials at the CDC made a decision of their own: Take our data and go home.

The sudden disappearance of the CDC’s coronavirus dashboards on Wednesday — which drew considerable scrutiny before the agency restored them on Thursday afternoon — has become the latest flashpoint in the extraordinary breakdown between the Washington, D.C.-based federal health department and the nation’s premier public health agency, located in Atlanta.

While Democrats and health care groups spent Thursday blasting the Trump administration over the missing dashboards, which tracked critical data on coronavirus hospitalizations, officials at the Department of Health and Human Services insisted that they were just as shocked when the CDC’s data disappeared from public view. Continue reading.

CDC director warns second wave of coronavirus is likely to be even more devastating

Washington Post logoEven as states move ahead with plans to reopen their economies, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned Tuesday that a second wave of the novel coronavirus will be far more dire because it is likely to coincide with the start of flu season.

“There’s a possibility that the assault of the virus on our nation next winter will actually be even more difficult than the one we just went through,” CDC Director Robert Redfield said in an interview with The Washington Post. “And when I’ve said this to others, they kind of put their head back, they don’t understand what I mean.”

“We’re going to have the flu epidemic and the coronavirus epidemic at the same time,” he said. Continue reading.

CDC suggests nurses use bandanas, scarves during face mask shortage

CDC acknowledges recommendations are out of step with U.S. standards of care

As the national shortage of face masks becomes severe, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says nurses can use bandanas and scarves as makeshift masks when caring for COVID-19 patients — although it’s unclear whether they would protect medical workers.

The CDC says that option should be used “as a last resort” and only when the hospital nearly depletes its supply and experiences a crush of COVID-19 patients, reaching “crisis capacity.” The CDC acknowledges that its recommendations are out of step with standards of care in the United States.

[Hospitals want to kill a policy shielding nurses from COVID-19 because there aren’t enough masks]

Nurses and other health care providers can “use homemade masks (e.g., bandana, scarf) for care of patients with COVID-19,” the CDC website now reads. The agency says in the next sentence that the homemade masks’ capability to protect health care providers against the coronavirus-caused disease “is unknown.” Continue reading.

Words banned at CDC were also banned at other HHS agencies: report

The following article by Brooke Seipel was posted on the Hill website December 16, 2017:

© Getty Images

Multiple agencies in the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) have reportedly been told by the Trump administration that they cannot use certain phrases in official documents.

Officials from two HHS agencies, who asked that their names and agencies remain anonymous, told The Washington Post that they had been given a list of “forbidden” words similar to the one given to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

A second HHS agency was told not to use the phrases “entitlement,” “diversity” and “vulnerable,” in documents. It was also told to use “ObamaCare” as opposed to the “Affordable Care Act” and to refer to “marketplaces,” where people purchase health insurance, as “exchanges.” Continue reading “Words banned at CDC were also banned at other HHS agencies: report”