This is beyond disturbing, but we’re living it, unfortunately. While the news headlines (as reported here by Mark Sumner) may have tongues clucking tonight about Trump’s so-called intent to enforce Covid-19 reporting by hospitals through the use of National Guard troops, there is one small piece of information associated with that report that should not go unnoticed.
From the New York Times:
The Trump administration has ordered hospitals to bypass the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and, beginning on Wednesday, send all coronavirus patient information to a central database in Washington — a move that has alarmed public health experts who fear the data will be distorted for political gain.
The new instructions are contained in a little-noticed document posted this week on the Department of Health and Human Services’ website, Sheryl Gay Stolberg reports. From now on, H.H.S., and not the C.D.C., will collect daily reports about the patients that each hospital is treating, how many beds and ventilators are available, and other information vital to tracking the pandemic.
The under-the-radar move was ostensibly prompted by Deborah Birx, Trump’s “coronavirus task force” response coordinator, who was purportedly dissatisfied with the way hospitals were reporting data. It’s not clear whether Birx actually does anything at this time except appear as a sort of apologist for Trump during his incoherent ramblings about the pandemic. And considering the abysmal state of the White House’s “coronavirus response,” she doesn’t seem to “coordinate” much at all.
But regardless of what actually prompted this unprecedented derogation of the CDC’s role, the new reality per this directive is that all Hospital Covid-19 information will now go straight through a political filter at HHS, now, like most of the federal agencies, populated with Trump loyalists having little or no experience in what the agency is supposed to do.
Public health experts have long expressed concern that the administration is politicizing science and undermining the disease control centers; four former C.D.C. directors, spanning both Republican and Democratic administrations, said as much in an opinion piece published Tuesday in The Washington Post. The data collection shift reinforced those fears.
“Centralizing control of all data under the umbrella of an inherently political apparatus is dangerous and breeds distrust,” said Nicole Lurie, who served as assistant secretary for preparedness and response under former President Barack Obama. “It appears to cut off the ability of agencies like C.D.C. to do its basic job.”
So from this point, going forward, the White House will have its agents in HHS have a quick look-see to decide what data should or should not be released, in order to best impact Trump’s re-election prospects. It goes without saying that HHS won’t be reporting anything that the White House doesn’t sanitize, but will be emphasizing anything that helps the administration from a political standpoint. The data will continue to be available to state health departments, presumably.
It seems we may be looking forward to some remarkably sunny and positive infection rate data from HHS sometime in October.
Unfortunately, that data will most likely be false.
Please see also Aldous J. Pennyfarthing’s take on this, here.