Health experts are protesting the Trump administration’s order to the nation’s hospitals to cut the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) out of the Covid-19 data-collection loop.
Instead, data on hospitalized coronavirus patients will go to a central database in Washington that is not available to the public.
The order was to take effect on Wednesday.
To the president’s critics, it continues a pattern of Trump undermining health experts further his goal of re-election. He has in the past complained that more testing for the virus inevitably turns up more cases, which looks bad for him politically.
“Public health experts and infectious disease scientists are sounding an alarm on the new protocols, noting that further politicization of this pandemic will hurt frontline workers and patients,” reports USA Today.
Adding to confusion over the surprise order, the administration is asking governors to deploy National Guard troops to help collect data and submit daily reports to the Health and Human Services (HHS) database.
The notion of using soldiers to handle virus data was contained in a letter to governors from HHS Secretary Alex Azar and Dr. Deborah Birx, coordinator of the White House Corona Virus Task Force. Copies of the letter were obtained by the Washington Post.
All this leads to worries about whether important data might be concealed or manipulated by the administration.
As one Twitter post put it: “They want to prevent us from knowing how bad it really is.”
As of Wednesday morning, the Johns Hopkins Covid-19 Tracker showed nearly 3.5 million cases in the U.S., and almost 136,500 deaths.
“How will the data be protected?” asked Jen Kates of the Kaiser Family Foundation in comments to the New York Times. “Will there be transparency, will there be access, and what is the role of the CDC in understanding the data?”
Dr. Sanjay Gupta, chief medical correspondent for CNN, said the change will “lead to more opaqueness” about coronavirus data.
“What logic does this have, other than to take away the data from the epidemiologists that are the best in the world at looking at this data, making sense of it, translating it for people, versus giving it to HHS,” Gupta said Wednesday morning.
The now-crippled CDC coronavirus tracking system includes more than 25,000 hospitals and other medical facilities nationwide.
President Trump has frequently criticized the CDC, claiming the agency’s non-partisan approach to the pandemic is in fact part of a campaign against him driven by politics.
That view was countered in a Washington Post op-ed article by four former CDC directors and acting directors.
“We’re seeing the terrible effect of undermining the CDC play out in our population,” they wrote on Tuesday. “Willful disregard for public health guidelines is, unsurprisingly, leading to a sharp rise in infections and deaths. America now stands as a global outlier in the coronavirus pandemic.”
“The United States is home to a quarter of the world’s reported coronavirus infections and deaths, despite being home to only 4.4 percent of the global population,” the ex-CDC directors wrote.
“Sadly, we are not even close to having the virus under control. Quite the opposite, in fact.”