Meddling impedes virus reports
Political appointees reportedly causing delays at CDC
WASHINGTON — Political appointees at the Department of Health and Human Services have repeatedly asked the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to revise, delay and even scuttle weekly reports on the coronavirus they believed were unflattering to President Donald Trump.
Current and former senior health officials with direct knowledge of phone calls, emails and other communication between the agencies said on Saturday that meddling from Washington was turning widely followed and otherwise apolitical guidance on infectious disease, the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports, into a political loyalty test, with career scientists framed as adversaries of the administration.
They confirmed an article in Politico on Friday night that the CDC’s public morbidity reports, which one former top health official described on Saturday as the “holiest of the holy” in agency literature, have been targeted for months by senior officials in the health department’s communications office. It is unclear whether any of the reports were substantially altered, but important federal health studies have been delayed because of the pressure.
The reports are written largely for scientists and public health experts, updating them on trends in all infectious diseases, COVID19 included. They are guarded so closely by agency staff members that political appointees only see them just before they are published. Health department officials have typically only
received notice of the titles of the reports.
Michael Caputo, a former Trump campaign official installed by the White House in April as the top department spokesman, said Saturday that the person most involved in reshaping the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports has been Paul Alexander, an assistant professor of health research at McMaster University in Canada and an adviser Caputo hired to help with him on the science of the pandemic.
“He digs into these MMWRs and makes his position known, and his position isn’t popular with the career scientists sometimes,” Caputo said. “That’s called science. Disagreement is science. Nobody has been ever ordered to do anything.” But Caputo and Alexander appeared to view the reports, which have presented dire new findings about the spread of the virus, as incompatible with the Trump administration’s push to move beyond the pandemic and present the country as on the upswing, officials said.
The New York Times interviewed four current and former federal health officials on Saturday with direct knowledge of efforts to warp the weekly reports. They spoke on the condition of anonymity. In an email obtained by Politico and confirmed by a person with direct knowledge of them, Alexander accused CDC scientists of trying to “hurt the president” with the reports, which he referred to as “hit pieces on the administration.” Alexander asked Dr. Robert Redfield, the CDC director, to edit reports that had already been published, which he believed overstated the risks of the virus for children and undermined the administration’s efforts to encourage schools to reopen.
Caputo and Alexander also tried to stop the publication of a report — issued last week after a delay — on use of the malaria drug hydroxy chloroquine, an unproven treatment that Trump and conservative allies have heralded and used as a kind of litmus test of resistance to scientific consensus. In discussions with the CDC, they questioned the political beliefs of the report’s authors.
The political involvement “undermines the credibility of not only the MMWR but of the CDC. And the CDC’s credibility has been tarnished throughout C OVID already,” said Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease specialist at Vanderbilt University who sits on the external editorial board of the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports.
“The MMWR had an unblemished reputation as being accurate, objective and science-based, free from political influence,” he said.
The reports have an internationally respected place in public health history, often breaking news about developments in disease research. Perhaps the best-known is the one the CDC published on June 5, 1981, about five previously healthy young gay men in Los Angeles who had developed a form of pneumonia ordinarily seen in people with depressed immune systems. Two of them died. It was the first recorded report of the illness that would be named AIDS and has killed an estimated 32 million people around the world.
The reports have “been so successful that it has been the model for other similar communicable disease bulletins by ministries of health around the world,” Schaffner said.