Behind the push to reopen schools
Officials say White House put pressure on CDC in summer
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 behindthe-scenes effort, White House officials also tried to circumvent the CDC 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 Donald 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 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 CDC alarmed at the degree of pressure from the White House.
One member of Pence’s staff said she was repeatedly asked by Marc Short, the vice president’s chief of staff, to get the CDC to produce more reports and charts showing a decline in coronavirus cases among young people.
Olivia Troye, one of 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 CDC 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 Troye, who left the White House in August and has begun speaking out publicly against Trump.
According to Troye, Short dispatched other members of the vice president’s staff to circumvent the CDC in search of data he thought might better support the White House’s position.
After Troye went public in September, Short told MSNBC that she had a vendetta against the president.
Several former officials said that before one task force briefing in late June, White House officials, including Troye, spoke to top CDC 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 CDC distributed that week to other agencies, which showed 60% of coronavirus deaths were people over the age of 75. Officials asked the CDC 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, Birx took a direct role in an effort to push the CDC to incorporate work from a littleknown 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 CDC, 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, Birx asked Dr. Robert Redfield, the CDC director, to incorporate the document “as background in the introduction section” of the CDC guidance.
CDC 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 CDC was successful in beating back some of the proposed changes, and the line about asymptomatic children was not included in its final guidelines.
But stressing the potential risks of children not attending school became the introductory text of the final CDC policy, leaving some officials there dismayed.
The internal battle began in July, weeks after a group of CDC 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.
One of the guidance documents the CDC 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 CDC.
The seven-page draft conceded scientists were “still learning about how it spreads, how it affects children and what role children may play in its spread.”
In early July, Trump became angry about what he thought were the CDC’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!”