The House panel probing the Trump administration’s coronavirus
response released new documents detailing political appointees’
extensive efforts to modify or scuttle scientific Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention reports, as it also ordered top
Trump health officials to quickly provide documents.
Trump appointees attempted to “alter or block” at least 13
scientific reports on the coronavirus as outbreaks surged across
the spring and summer, Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.), the chair of the
House select subcommittee on coronavirus, wrote on Monday in
a letter that was shared with POLITICO.
“Top political officials at [Health and Human Services] and [the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] not only tolerated
these efforts, but in some cases aided them,” Clyburn added in the
letter to HHS Secretary Alex Azar and CDC Director Robert
Redfield.
Clyburn issued subpoenas to Azar and Redfield, ordering them by
Dec. 30 to produce “full and unredacted” documents that Clyburn
said his panel has sought for months.
The panel’s probe into administration’s coronavirus response
began in mid-September, shortly after a
POLITICO story revealed how appointees meddled with the famed
Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports, which are authored by
career scientists and are typically free of political interference.
In recent weeks, the panel released evidence alleging that Redfield
ordered agency staff to
delete an email that appeared to show political interference
and that a political adviser
repeatedly advocated a controversial “herd immunity”
strategy regarded by most public health experts as reckless.
Clyburn’s subcommittee on Monday produced dozens of new
documents detailing how Trump appointees — including then-science
adviser Paul Alexander, the department’s top spokesperson Michael
Caputo and other health department officials — worked to subvert
the CDC’s MMWR reports.
Among the MMWRs that were targeted for edits: reports on the use
of masks, the spread of Covid-19 in children, the virus’
transmission during an April 7 primary election in Milwaukee and
other reports that were seen as politically sensitive.
The newly released documents further detailed appointees’
extensive efforts to suppress and even write a rebuttal to planned
reports on hydroxychloroquine, the malaria drug favored by
President Donald Trump as a coronavirus treatment despite little
evidence of its effectiveness. CDC has historically insisted that
political appointees not review the draft content of the MMWRs, but
in at least one case, Trump appointees obtained the full text of a
pending report.
“I got the draft of the WWMR [sic] about hydroxychloroquine and
media that was supposed to be released on Tuesday,” then-CDC
adviser Nina Witkofsky
wrote on June 29 to Alexander, Caputo and Caputo’s aide
Madeleine Hubbard. Witkofsky, who served as a contractor helping
plan events for Medicaid chief Seema Verma before joining the
Trump administration this summer, was tapped in August to be the
CDC’s acting chief of staff.
The MMWR on hydroxychloroquine, which reviewed how
doctors prescribed the drug, was originally scheduled to be
published on June 30 but was not published until Sept. 4.
The reasons for the delay were not immediately clear, but Trump
appointees in the meantime further strategized on how to minimize
the CDC’s findings – including Alexander’s plans to publicly
dismiss the agency’s hydroxychloroquine report. “The authors of
this study are a disgrace to public service,” Alexander wrote in
a
planned rebuttal that does not appear to have been publicly
released.
In his letter to HHS, Clyburn said the department continues to
block his panel’s scheduled interviews with Redfield, CDC principal
deputy director Anne Schuchat and Witkofsky, among other officials
that HHS previously agreed to make available. HHS also waited until
after the election to release its documents, which were mostly
pulled from Alexander’s files, Clyburn wrote, rather than from
officials like Azar and Caputo despite a previous commitment to do
so.
“Given the importance of the Select Subcommittee’s
investigation and the continued obstruction by HHS, subpoenas are
necessary,” Clyburn wrote.
Asked about the House panel’s findings, HHS said that it had
pulled more than 1 million documents for the subcommittee’s probe
and that Alexander, who has since left the department, did not set
strategy.
“While the Administration is focused on vaccination shots, the
Subcommittee is focused on cheap shots to create headlines and
mislead the American people,” said a department spokesperson who
requested anonymity.
The spokesperson did not respond to a question about whether the
department would comply with the panel’s subpoena. CDC did not
immediately respond to requests for comment.
Alexander and Witkofsky did not immediately respond to requests
for comment. Caputo, who took medical leave the same day that
Alexander left the department in September, has referred previous
inquiries to HHS.
According to the new documents, Bill Hall, the top career civil
servant in the HHS press shop, on June 5 warned Alexander, Caputo
and other officials that they should not interfere with the MMWRs,
comparing the CDC’s flagship reports to a “peer-reviewed journal”
akin to the Journal of the American Medical Association.
“[A]s matter of long-standing policy, we do not engage in
clearing scientific articles, as that arena needs to remain an
independent process,” Hall wrote in an email obtained by the
subcommittee.
But the subcommittee’s documents reveal that political
appointees instead kept trying to edit a series of internal and
external reports.
“Hi Michael, is this not the article we were shelving?”
Alexander wrote to Caputo and Witkofsky on June 29 about a pending
CDC-authored report on hydroxychloroquine that was set to run
in JAMA. The House panel concluded that Alexander “appeared to
mistake” the planned JAMA report for the MMWR report that would be
delayed.
The subcommittee also released documents showing how Alexander
repeatedly petitioned Charlotte Kent, the MMWR editor-in-chief, to
make changes to planned reports, such as an upcoming MMWR on the
spread of Covid-19 at a Georgia summer camp amid a robust debate
about whether it was safe to reopen schools in the fall. In a
separate email chain, CDC career officials discussed how best to
navigate the political pressures, and Kent ultimately sent
Alexander an email seeking to placate him.
“In response to thoughtful comments from CDC leadership and you,
the opening sentence of Georgia’s report has been reframed,”
Kent wrote to Alexander and other officials on July 28. “The
opening sentence was the only reference to schools or institutions
of higher learning in the report, and reference to them has been
removed.”
However, the Georgia summer camp report, which was released on
July 31, still angered the health department’s Trump appointees,
sparking another effort to author their own response that they
believed would be more favorable to the president.
“I am not sure where it can be published but this has very
re-assuring information and even for the White House,” Alexander
wrote in a
planned rebuttal to the report.
HHS has insisted that there was no interference in the MMWRs,
pointing to comments from Kent, the reports’ editor, who
during a Dec. 7 interview with House investigators said that
the agency published reports that were scientifically sound.
“Dr. Kent’s interview established there was no political
interference in the publication of MMWR Articles,” Sarah Arbes, the
HHS assistant secretary for legislation,
wrote to Clyburn last week.
Clyburn, however, said Kent’s testimony made clear there was
political pressure to alter her office’s reports.
“To the extent career staff were successful in limiting the
damage, as Dr. Kent stated she was, that is a testament to the
career staff’s integrity and resilience — not an indication
that the Trump Administration’s political pressure tactics were
appropriate or scientifically sound,” Clyburn wrote Monday.
The documents released by Clyburn’s panel also further shed
light on interactions between Trump appointees and career health
department officials as the outbreak worsened. In one exchange, a
CDC official complaining about the “pattern of hostile and
threatening behavior” from Caputo, the department’s top
spokesperson who was
personally installed by the president.
“In what world did you think it was your job to announce an
Administration public service announcement to CNN?” Caputo wrote
to a CDC official who confirmed to a CNN reporter in June that the
health department was pursuing a vaccine education campaign. Caputo
had previously told the reporter she was “wildly incorrect” when
she inquired about the campaign.
In another
set of July emails, Caputo demanded the name of a CDC press
officer who arranged an interview between a
senior official and NPR about the health department’s data
changes without his permission.
After POLITICO
obtained emails of Alexander pressuring infectious-disease
expert Anthony Fauci to not speak publicly about the risks of
Covid-19 to children, Alexander protested to colleagues that he
wanted to go public with his complaints about Fauci.
“They have no clue what they are saying and I welcome the chance
to inform them,” Alexander
wrote on Sept. 9. HHS announced that Alexander, who is a
part-time professor at a Canadian university, would exit the
department a week later.
