Members of Donald Trump’s team when he was in the White House prevented health officials from providing certain information on the COVID-19, in order to go in the direction of the optimistic vision of the former American president , says a parliamentary report published on Monday.
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Senior officials from the Centers for Disease Prevention and Control (CDC), the main federal health agency in the United States, have told investigators that members of the Trump administration intimidated staff and tried to rewrite their reports. in order to align them with the statements of the president, who minimized the epidemic crisis.
Investigators interviewed a dozen current and former CDC officials, as well as senior government officials, for the 91-page report released by a congressional committee looking into the COVID-19 crisis.
In it, the House panel describes how Health Department officials, designated by Donald Trump, attempted to take control of the CDC’s weekly scientific journal, the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, by editing or censoring articles they considered harmful to the Republican president.
These officials have sought to “alter the content, contradict or delay the publication” of 18 of these weekly reports, as well as a health alert, and this has been successful on five occasions, according to the parliamentary report.
The commission’s investigation “showed that the previous administration embarked on an unprecedented campaign of political interference in the federal government’s response to the pandemic, which undermined public health in favor of the political goals of the former president, ”said the chairman of the commission, the elected Democrat Jim Clyburn, in a press release.
Previous reports have already highlighted attempts by the Trump administration to censor senior health officials or to pressure the United States Medicines Agency to reissue emergency authorization for hydroxy chloroquine. This anti-malaria drug was touted by Donald Trump as a cure for COVID-19, despite evidence to the contrary.
Republicans dismissed the report’s findings on Monday, calling it partisan, and vowed to conduct their own investigation if they win back a majority in any house of Congress in November’s election.
