United States government edict rings alarm bells

Facts are awkward, but they’re tough.

They fight with opinions, battle with dogma — and, unless you’re predisposed to deny them out of hand, they’ll eventually win.

But when you decide to deliberately take data out of the equation, all bets are off.

And when a government takes action to remove objective data from public view, especially objective data that the public has paid to collect, you know something’s up.

That’s why the move by the administration of former prime minister Stephen Harper to take away the ability of Canadian federal scientists to talk publicly about their work was significant. Requiring anyone — even someone studying glaciation in the Great Lakes region, for example — to have their work and fitness for an interview to be vetted through political staffers meant that any data that was in any way troublesome for the Conservative government and its policies simply didn’t see the light of day. That policy’s since been overturned.

But there’s a new version, south of the border, and it has to do not only with the United States, but with how we’re going deal with when and if we open our borders to Americans in the near future.

The U.S. government has told hospitals to stop reporting data on COVID-19 infection rates and deaths to the arm’s-length Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and instead pass that information on to a division of the Department of Health and Human Services. In the process, there are fears the database containing that information will move from a publicly accessible one to a closed system.

In fact, the collected data will be handed over to a private operator in Pittsburgh, which was awarded an untendered contract to do the work.

The White House has said that the CDC was moving too slowly in preparing and releasing COVID-19 totals.

If the excuse the Trump administration was giving for the move is in fact true, though, there wouldn’t be any problem for hospitals to continue to supply data to the CDC as well as the new, supposedly more efficient private contractor.

But taking control of the data out of the CDC’s hands suggests something else again.

That’s especially the case when President Donald Trump already maintains that the number of viral cases depends on the number of tests done, so that you can slow the spread of the virus by simply cutting the number of tests you do: no tests, no virus.

Remove the data — COVID-19 test results — and you remove the virus.

Too bad it’s not that simple.

The real problem, though, is what happens if we can’t trust the American system to adequately and accurately report on what’s happening with COVID-19 inside the American border. If we’re going to reopen the border to anyone beyond essential workers, we’re going to have to have confidence that we’re making that move based on clear, obvious, unmanipulated evidence. The kind of evidence the CDC is renowned for.

There has been a mountain of opinion about the effects of COVID-19, and the spread of COVID-19, in the United States. Going into a presidential election, there is nothing the Republicans would like more than to be able to show the virus is disappearing.

The problem is that the data isn’t showing that to be the case. The data is showing the virus taking exactly the path that scientists warned it would.

The only way to make the virus disappear right now — at least on paper — is to make the data conveniently disappear first.

And that might just be happening right before our eyes.