For three-quarters of a century, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has functioned to protect the health of the nation, prevent epidemics, and provide information, education, and tools for communities to advance public health. Then came Donald Trump. "In interviews with CNN, CDC officials say their agency's efforts to mount a coordinated response to the Covid-19 pandemic have been hamstrung by a White House whose decisions are driven by politics rather than science," that outlet reports.
Six "mid- and higher-ranking staff members" in the CDC spoke to CNN, apparently in an attempt to raise an alarm about the clear and present danger Trump presents to the people of the U.S. and to fight back against Trump's ongoing war with and efforts to place blame on the agency. "We've been muzzled," one current CDC official told CNN. "What's tough is that if we would have acted earlier on what we knew and recommended, we would have saved lives and money."
Trump sidelined the agency early on when the CDC was tracking the disease's progression to Europe and proposed a global travel advisory, a recommendation the White House delayed for about a week, during which some 66,000 Europeans travelled into U.S. airports every day. This was about the same time that Dr. Nancy Messonnier, a high-ranking CDC official, warned the U.S. in a Feb. 26 press conference: "It's not so much a question of if this will happen anymore but rather more a question of exactly when this will happen and how many people in this country will have severe illness."
Trump was on a state visit to India at the time, full of his happy talk about the novel coronavirus, downplaying the threat it posed to the U.S. Trump was so incensed that a public health official would tell the truth about a public health threat that he threatened to fire her, and she has since been sidelined. With her, the CDC has effectively been sidelined as well, because the truth hurts Trump politically.
That means direct attacks from Trump officials and fingers pointing at the CDC, to try to deflect the massive failures stemming directly from Trump. It means squashing the public health guidelines from the agency if they contradict Trump's political aims. It means trying to get the CDC to cook the books to make the death toll look less severe.
It means that Trump is endangering more lives by not letting the CDC do the job it was created to do: protect the public's health. "The message we received in previous administrations was, you guys are the scientists," one CDC employee told CNN. "That's not the case this time. If the science that we are offering up contradicts a specific policy goal, then we are the problem."