Donald Trump Is Destroying the CDC
(Bloomberg Opinion) -- Inch by inch, since the start of the pandemic, the White House has sought to sabotage the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for the political benefit of President Donald Trump. To an alarming extent, it has succeeded. Once globally recognized as “the best science-based, data-driven agency in the world,” in the words of its current director, the CDC is now in danger of losing the public’s trust entirely.
The most glaring problem has been communication. Against the best judgment of its own staffers, the agency has said that reopening schools is crucial even if doing so increases the spread of the coronavirus. It has failed to caution churches to suspend or limit the use of choirs, which have been associated with outbreaks. It has even discouraged testing asymptomatic people, against the advice of nearly all experts — though it eventually reversed itself under a barrage of criticism. In each case, the agency’s scientific staff were ignored or overruled under pressure from the White House or from Trump himself.
At every step, in fact, the administration has made matters worse. Its political operatives have pushed the CDC to revise Covid-19 analyses in its respected Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports, and have brazenly bullied agency officials. In an email obtained by the New York Times, an HHS adviser accused Dr. Anne Schuchat, an esteemed deputy director, of working to “embarrass the president.” Trump publicly criticized CDC Director Robert Redfield for emphasizing to Congress the importance of wearing masks and acknowledging the reality that vaccines are unlikely to be widely available until next year.
Redfield has failed to forcefully push back on these attacks. But he is not principally to blame for the CDC’s fall from grace. That responsibility rests squarely with Trump, who is showing how much harm a president can cause by forcing federal agencies to serve his own political purposes. Rather than allow the CDC to do its job of keeping Americans informed about Covid-19, he has prodded the agency to echo his false message that the crisis has passed, that it’s safe to go back to school, to work, to church, to political rallies — maskless and carefree.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/donald-trump-is-destroying-the-cdc/ar-BB19v6pX?li=BBnbfcL
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