{"id":5960,"date":"2021-08-31T14:54:51","date_gmt":"2021-08-31T14:54:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lonecandle.com\/?p=5960"},"modified":"2021-08-31T14:54:51","modified_gmt":"2021-08-31T14:54:51","slug":"covid-19-was-always-going-to-be-a-struggle-for-the-cdc-but-trump-sure-didnt-help","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/?p=5960","title":{"rendered":"COVID-19 Was Always Going To Be A Struggle For The CDC. But Trump Sure Didn\u2019t Help."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\n\n“And, to be sure, the Trump administration did things that not only were well outside established norms but also undermined the CDC and the entire field of public health. For example, on April 3, 2020, while announcing the agency\u2019s recommendation<\/a> to wear masks, the president repeatedly emphasized that no one had<\/em> to wear masks<\/a> and explicitly said that he personally wasn\u2019t going to wear one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The administration also pushed for edits to the CDC\u2019s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports<\/a>, long the primary means for communicating scientific data to other researchers and the broader medical community. These edits were political, designed to downplay the growing number of COVID-19 deaths and support decisions the administration had already made about issues like school reopenings. Emails revealed that members of the Trump administration were accusing the CDC of trying to make the administration look bad by releasing data disclosing the dire nature of the pandemic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Those kinds of actions by a presidential administration were unprecedented. And they contributed to a loss of morale and a sense within the CDC that everyone just needed to keep their heads down and not make waves. But the political issues weren\u2019t just about what the administration did \u2014 they were also about what it didn\u2019t do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By early March 2020, the CDC had all but disappeared from press briefings on the COVID-19 pandemic. No one in the Trump administration ever explicitly said that the agency wouldn\u2019t be speaking to the public. But, quietly, that\u2019s exactly what happened. By May 2020, the Union of Concerned Scientists could graph the disappearance of the CDC<\/a>. And this was a completely different situation from what had happened in past pandemics, when presidents let the CDC take the lead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the same time, the Trump administration did not seem to facilitate communication between the CDC and outside experts \u2014 something the scientists I spoke to said had been the norm for past administrations faced with a public health crisis.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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COVID-19 Was Always Going To Be A Struggle For The CDC. But Trump Sure Didn’t Help.<\/a><\/blockquote>