San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Trump’s coronavirus coverup
President Trump famously prefers to deny, distort and obstruct difficult truths rather than contend with them. That has held constant from Russian interference to the Ukrainian affair and from an illattended inauguration to a handaltered hurricane forecast.
But a pandemic, measured by such incontrovertible facts as positive tests, crowded hospitals and lost lives, is considerably more difficult to cover up. That hasn’t stopped him from trying.
The Trump administration last week abruptly shifted control of important coronavirus data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to top officials at Health and Human Services, the Cabinet department that includes the CDC, alarming public health experts within and outside the administration. The move took information on virusrelated hospitalizations, intensive care capacity, staffing and crucial equipment and medicine away from an ostensibly apolitical, sciencedriven agency charged with managing pandemics and health statistics, putting it in the hands of political appointees close to the president. Bizarrely, administration officials also threatened to get the military involved in collecting the data.
Hospitals have reported the statistics in question to the CDC since March using a longestablished system known as the National Healthcare Safety Network. As of last week, however, Health and Human Services directed hospitals to start submitting the information to the department through TeleTracking, a Pittsburgh company awarded a $10 million nobid contract to create the new system in April. Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, the ranking Democrat on the chamber’s health committee, questioned the contract last month in a letter to CDC Director Robert Redfield, noting that despite deficiencies in existing data, “the establishment of the TeleTracking system — at significant cost — duplicates the collection of data that was already being reported.”
While the CDC’s data and processes could certainly be improved, that doesn’t justify cutting the agency out of a longstanding core function. A chorus of epidemiologists, hospital officials and virus trackers have joined in Murray’s concern, noting the lack of a convincing rationale for the change and fearing the agency would be sidelined as a source of transparent, objective, scientific information on the pandemic. The tracking website COVID Exit Strategy reported Wednesday that the centers’ data on hospital capacity had gone dark. A CDC scientist supervising coronavirus data collection told National Public Radio that the new system lacks “the track record and the expertise that we’re able to provide.”
Administration officials maintained that the change was meant to speed and improve reporting of the data and that the information would continue to be available to the CDC and the public. Their track record does not recommend confidence in their good intentions, though.
The White House, after all, is bullying the CDC over school safety guidelines that Trump considers too stringent to accommodate his political goals. Four former CDC directors spanning Democratic and Republican administrations wrote in response that they could not “recall over our collective tenure a single time when political pressure led to a change in the interpretation of scientific evidence.”
The White House also attempted to discredit the nation’s single most trusted source of information about the pandemic, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci, by deploying opposition research with all the grace and subtlety of a mudslinging city council campaign. And despite the continued struggle to mount enough testing to stem the outbreak, Trump has often questioned the value of detecting cases on the grounds that revealing the scope of the pandemic makes him look bad.
None of this constitutes a departure from the president’s habit of distorting reality to serve his purposes. But it is Trump’s most audacious and destructive adventure yet in managing perceptions at the expense of managing the country.