CDC officials describe intense pressure, job threats from Trump White House

Several public health officials detailed the months-long campaign against Schuchat, fueled by Trump appointees’ belief that her dark assessments of the pandemic have rubbed off on the president, prompting Schuchat, a 32-year CDC veteran, to openly wonder if she would be fired in the summer of 2020, her colleagues told the panel.

The panel’s latest report also offers new insight into key flashpoints, such as a CDC-backed plan to require masks on public and commercial transportation in the summer of 2020, according to Martin Cetron, director of the Department of Global Migration and Quarantine of the agency, cited evidence that the requirement would reduce the risks of COVID to travelers.

The plan was supported by the travel industry and “could have made a significant contribution” by curbing infections and deaths ahead of this year’s fall and winter virus boom, Cetron added, but Trump officials blocked the measure. President Biden later issued a similar order on his second day in office in January 2021.

Redfield and other officials told the panel they believed they could be fired if they angered the White House by impeding the CDC’s ability to fight the virus.

“If we keep pointing fingers and blaming somebody else for things, we lose sight of the fact that the real enemy here was the virus,” Setron said in a May 2022 interview included in the report, adding that political infighting contributed to the pandemic, which did not is such a good answer. Cetron also criticized a federal order, Title 42, which used the pandemic as a public health reason to bar people from entering the United States at its borders with Canada and Mexico, as an example of a poorly constructed policy where CDC experts were overruled .

The order was “handed down to us,” Setron told the panel, saying then-White House counsel Stephen Miller was among the officials who discussed the immigration restrictions. Other emails and media reports have linked Miller to creating the order.

While Cetron said he and his team oppose the order, arguing it has no scientific basis because covid is already widespread in the United States and could harm asylum seekers, Redfield signed Title 42 in March 2020 d. The Trump administration has characterized the measure, which allows the government to immediately send asylum seekers back to their home countries, as a way to prevent the spread of infection in detention cells, border crossings and other crowded places. Since then, hundreds of thousands of migrants have been turned back at the US-Mexico border. The measure remains in place today under the Biden administration after a district court judge in May blocked the administration’s plan to lift the order.

The panel’s report is based on more than 2,100 pages of transcribed interviews with Redfield, Schuchat, Setron and 10 other current and former CDC officials that were released as recently as Monday, in addition to previous interviews and testimony from people such as the former White House coordinator on coronavirus Deborah Birks. The panel also released other documents, including a letter sent by two former Trump staffers, Kyle McGowan and Amanda Campbell, who served as CDC chief of staff and deputy chief of staff, respectively, detailing examples of political interference and mistreatment to CDC officials.

“The committee’s report reflects a serious and honest view of what happened,” McGowan said.

Rep. James E. Clyburn (D.S.C.), who chairs the panel, said the report demonstrates how the Trump White House has made a concerted effort to “downplay the seriousness” of the pandemic.

“This prioritization of politics, disdain for science and refusal to follow the advice of public health experts has harmed the nation’s ability to respond effectively to the coronavirus crisis and put Americans at risk,” Clyburn said in a statement.

Clyburn’s panel spent more than two years investigating the Trump administration’s pandemic response, issuing a series of reports that detailed White House pressure on the Food and Drug Administration to authorize unproven coronavirus treatments such as the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine; his efforts to overrule public health officials on covid guidelines for churches; and an examination of how its focus on contesting the outcome of the 2020 election diverted attention from the response to the virus, among other findings.

Republicans attacked the panel’s reports as biased, saying they failed to examine the Biden administration’s mistakes with the virus or the origins of the pandemic. GOP leaders are vowing to conduct their own investigations next year if they win back the House or Senate. CDC Director Rochelle Walensky also acknowledged this summer that her agency made significant mistakes during the pandemic, laying out a plan designed to speed up its recommendations, improve its communications and take other steps to win back public trust.

The report also details how Trump appointees at the Department of Health and Human Services worked to wrest control of the agency’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports, or MMWRs, which offer public updates of scientists’ findings and have been deemed off limits for political appointments for decades.

McGowan and Campbell told the panel that the man Trump appointees were angered by the May 2020 MMWR, written by Schuchat, which they felt did not give them enough credit for their efforts to contain the pandemic.

“Secretary [Alex] Azar, in particular, was upset and said that if the CDC did not agree, then HHS would take control of approving the publication,” McGowan and Campbell’s attorney wrote to the panel. As a result, Trump appointees increasingly gained access to draft CDC summaries and tried to redact or block reports, including one on the rise in hydroxychloroquine prescriptions that was held up for more than two months amid concerns that that it would draw attention to an unproven treatment being touted by Trump.

In a statement, Azar said he “never pressured Dr. Redfield to change the content of a single MMWR scientific article.”

“I have always considered the MMWR and other peer-reviewed scientific publications to be inviolable,” Azar added, saying he worked with Redfield to “protect the integrity” of the report’s peer review process after it was identified in May 2020 that ” defect’. Hazard did not specify the “defect” that needs to be fixed.

The panel concluded that Trump appointees sought to “change the content of, refute, or delay the release” of eighteen MMWRs and one inflammatory health alert syndrome in children who have previously tested positive for covid and have failed at least five times.

CDC officials said the agency resisted most significant efforts to redact their posts. “Was I concerned that there was an attempt to change the scientific content of the MMWR? yes Do I think they were successful? No,” Jay Butler, the CDC’s deputy director for infectious diseases, said in a November 2021 interview.

The panel also described repeated attempts by Trump appointees to pressure Schuchat, such as a personal phone call from then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows — the first time a White House chief of staff had called a deputy. CDC chairman, she said — it left her “very shaken,” she told the panel, declining to provide details of the conversation on the advice of HHS counsel.

Meadows did not immediately respond to an email sent to a spokesperson.

Schuchat was again targeted after an interview she gave to a medical journal in June 2020, in which she acknowledged the nation’s struggles to contain the virus. HHS spokesman Michael Caputo and his adviser Paul Alexander released internal emails alleging the CDC vice chairman was trying to “harm the president.”

Other officials described interactions with Caputo and Alexander in which the two men “intimidated” staff, such as when a CDC official spoke to NPR without the permission of the HHS spokesman in July, the panel said. Caputo “wanted to fire the CDC employee who arranged the interview,” McGowan and Campbell’s attorney wrote to the panel.

Caputo declined a request for comment. Alexander did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Redfield said he repeatedly told Caputo that Alexander should stop his barrage of emails to officials demanding changes to CDC publications and accusing them of working to undermine Trump. “I stood up for Caputo, probably around [late June], that he must get rid of this person. He is not helpful,” Redfield told the panel.

But Alexander’s messages continued until mid-September, when his emails were leaked to the press and Caputo subsequently accused CDC scientists of mutiny in a Facebook Live video. Caputo took a medical leave on September 16, and Alexander left the agency the same day.

Redfield also said he has clashed with the White House and Florida politicians over his plan to reissue a “no-sail order” that would keep the nation’s cruise ships docked amid evidence that covid can quickly spread on board on vessels and sicken and potentially kill vulnerable passengers.

“I was signing it… [even] if that meant me resigning or being fired as CDC director,” Redfield told the panel. He said he was eventually able to reach a compromise in October 2020 that kept the ships docked until the cruise industry introduced more safeguards.