Stop meddling in public health

This appeared in The Washington Post.

Disturbing evidence keeps piling up that President Donald Trump and his administration are meddling for political purposes in the work of the nation’s leading public health guardians, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration. The integrity of these agencies is vital to fighting the pandemic and to the rollout of a vaccine. To compromise them helps no one, not even Trump.

We first saw this in Trump’s misguided touting of the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine. Then in August, Trump, eager to showcase progress in fighting the pandemic, pressed for approval of expanded use of blood plasma from recovered patients to treat the ill. The National Institutes of Health had concerns about effectiveness. On Aug. 19, Trump phoned Dr. Francis Collins, NIH director, with a blunt message. “Get it done by Friday,” he said, according to the New York Times. Trump announced the FDA’s authorization on Sunday, on the eve of the Republican convention, using an exaggerated estimate of its potential usefulness.

Now comes fresh evidence that the CDC’s scientific reports are being manipulated to meet Trump’s political imperatives. Politico reported that communications officials at HHS are reviewing and editing the CDC’s dispatches, the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, written by career scientists. According to Politico, the assistant secretary for public affairs at HHS, Michael Caputo, and Paul Alexander, an assistant professor at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, who is Caputo’s scientific adviser, demanded changes in the MMWR reports. At one point, Alexander complained in an email that “CDC to me appears to be writing hit pieces on the administration.” The officials were “particularly bristling” about a report that described a coronavirus outbreak in June at a children’s overnight summer camp in Georgia and said children of all ages were susceptible to infection.

Caputo heaped scorn on the CDC scientists in a Facebook video, claiming CDC career government scientists were engaging in “sedition” in their handling of the pandemic and that scientists “deep in the bowels of the CDC” walked “around like they are monks” and “holy men” but engaged in “rotten science.” The agency announced Caputo is taking a 60-day medical leave from his post, while Alexander has left DHS entirely. Meanwhile, on Wednesday, Trump openly rebuked his own CDC director, Robert Redfield, who predicted that a vaccine may be available only next spring or summer, not before the upcoming election, as Trump insists.

The bare-knuckles politicization of science puts the nation at risk. It could misinform the public and distort policy decisions. Worst of all, it could lead people to lose faith in these public health agencies, cascading into dangerous distrust of a vaccine or drug therapy. It is hard to see the political profit in that.