Leaked Emails Show Trump Officials Pressuring CDC to Change Reports to Match President’s Covid Narrative
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Emails leaked to Politico and reporting from multiple sources show appointees of President Donald Trump attempting to pressure the Centers for Disease Control into changing reports to match Trump’s “optimistic” narrative.
Politico’s Dan Diamond reports that, according to three sources and several leaked emails, former Trump campaign official and current HHS official Michael Caputo has led an effort to interfere with the CDC’s reporting:
(S)ince Michael Caputo, a former Trump campaign official with no medical or scientific background, was installed in April as the health department’s new spokesperson, there have been substantial efforts to align the reports with Trump’s statements, including the president’s claims that fears about the outbreak are overstated, or stop the reports altogether.
Caputo and his team have attempted to add caveats to the CDC’s findings, including an effort to retroactively change agency reports that they said wrongly inflated the risks of Covid-19 and should have made clear that Americans sickened by the virus may have been infected because of their own behavior, according to the individuals familiar with the situation and emails reviewed by POLITICO.
Caputo’s team also has tried to halt the release of some CDC reports, including delaying a report that addressed how doctors were prescribing hydroxychloroquine, the malaria drug favored by Trump as a coronavirus treatment despite scant evidence. The report, which was held for about a month after Caputo’s team raised questions about its authors’ political leanings, was finally published last week. It said that “the potential benefits of these drugs do not outweigh their risks.”
Caputo defended the “interventions” by telling Politico that “Buried in this good [CDC] work are sometimes stories which seem to purposefully mislead and undermine the President’s Covid response with what some scientists label as poor scholarship — and others call politics disguised in science.”
Read Diamond’s full report here.
