Politics, science still fighting their wars
The conflicts between politicians and scientists date back to the emergence of the two hard-bound enemies.
The Washington Post reported on Friday, that Trump political appointees tried to silence a longtime top official at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The controversy was first revealed in a June 30 email, when Paul Alexander, one of the appointees at the Department of Health and Human Services excoriated Anne Schuchat, CDC principal deputy director, for remarks she made before the group affiliated with one of the nation’s leading medical journals.
Schuchat, a physician, spoke to the JAMA Network the day before, saying she hoped the country could “take it seriously and slow the transmission,” adding that “we have way too much virus across the country … right now.” The emails were first reported by The New York Times.
Even as the president and his top advisers were intent on reopening the country and boosting the economy, Schuchat’s comments alerted scientists to the controversy.
Alexander wrote to his boss, Michael Caputo, assistant secretary for public affairs at HHS, reprimanding Schuchat and writing a seven-point take-down of her assessment.
“Her comments are in contrast to those of senior members of the Trump administration — notably Vice President Pence, who said on Friday, ‘we have made truly remarkable progress,’” Alexander wrote. “Importantly, having the virus spread among the young and healthy is one of the methods to drive herd immunity.”
We don’t know how the young and healthy feel about that scary comment.
Both Caputo and Alexander are now gone. But their emails offer new insight into how they created their own power center at the agency overseeing the pandemic response and used it to censor, and even humiliate, top scientists and health officials in an effort to sideline them or make them conform to White House-sanctioned messages.
Caputo, a Trump loyalist engulfed in controversy, left on a 60day medical leave earlier after a bizarre Facebook rant in which he accused government scientists of “sedition” and to prepare for violence after the election. Alexander, a Canadian PhD he had hired on contract, was permanently let go.
Tom Inglesby, director of the Center for Health Security at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said that responding in real time to a pandemic is much different than the academic application of health guidelines.
“In this pandemic, there are many new things happening for the first time,” Inglesby said, “many decisions that need to be made in the setting of uncertainty, perhaps on the basis of unfolding information, research that is in progress one at a time when we don’t yet have the complete story.”