Emails Detail Effort to Silence C.D.C. and Question Its Science

[catbyte]

Emails from a former top Trump health official and his science adviser show how the two refused to accept Centers for Disease Control and Prevention science and sought to silence the agency.


Michael R. Caputo, the Health and Human Services Department’s top spokesman, went on medical leave this week, days after he attacked C.D.C. scientists in a bizarre Facebook video. Credit...Mark Wilson/Getty Images

By Noah Weiland
Sept. 18, 2020
Updated 5:12 p.m. ET

WASHINGTON — On June 30, as the coronavirus was cresting toward its summer peak, Dr. Paul Alexander, a new science adviser at the Department of Health and Human Services, composed a scathing two-page critique of an interview given by a experienced scientist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Dr. Anne Schuchat, a 32-year veteran of the C.D.C. and its principal deputy director, had appealed to Americans to wear masks and warned, “We have way too much virus across the country.” But Dr. Alexander, a part-time assistant professor of health research methods, appeared sure he understood the coronavirus better.

“Her aim is to embarrass the president,” he wrote, commenting on Dr. Schuchat’s appeal for face masks in an interview with the Journal of the American Medical Association.

“She is duplicitous,” he also wrote in an email to his boss, Michael R. Caputo, the Health and Human Services Department’s top spokesman who went on medical leave this week. He asked Mr. Caputo to “remind” Dr. Schuchat that during the H1N1 swine flu outbreak in 2009, thousands of Americans had died “under her work.”



snip

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/18/us/politics/trump-cdc-coronavirus.html