Report: Trump Officials Altering CDC Scientific Reports To Fit Covid-19 Coronavirus Message

U can’t touch this. Or at least, u shouldn’t touch this.

That MC Hammer song wasn’t about the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC’s) Morbidity and Mortaility Weekly Report (MMWR). But it could be. The CDC MMWR has long been a way for CDC scientists to regularly transmit important information, such as data on the Covid-19 coronavirus, out to the public. After all, there isn’t a reality show called “Keeping Up with the CDC Scientists.” They need the MMWR channel to go untouched by politicians and those with political agendas.

However, on Friday, Dan Diamond reported for POLITICO that Trump administration officials “have demanded the right to review and seek changes to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s weekly scientific reports charting the progress of the coronavirus pandemic, in what officials characterized as an attempt to intimidate the reports’ authors and water down their communications to health professionals.”

Holy cheeseburger with eggs, bananas, and spaghetti in a hot dog bun, Batman! What Diamond reported is disturbing in so many ways. He wrote that, “emails from communications aides to CDC Director Robert Redfield and other senior officials openly complained that the agency’s reports would undermine President Donald Trump's optimistic messages about the outbreak.” Is that because over 190,000 deaths from Covid-19 and the U.S. leading the world by far in Covid-19 cases and deaths kind of makes it difficult for people to believe “optimistic messages?” Perhaps.

Here Beth Linas, PhD, MHS, an infectious disease and digital health epidemiologist and science communication expert, shared another quote from the article:

So in other words, what you may read from the CDC may not be from the CDC but actually be from Trump officials? OK. That’s not OK.

Later on in the article Diamond wrote: “But since Michael Caputo, a former Trump campaign official with no medical or scientific background, was installed in April as the Health and Human Services department's new spokesperson, there have been substantial efforts to align the reports with Trump's statements, including the president's claims that fears about the outbreak are overstated, or stop the reports altogether.” Isn’t there a word for trying to align reports with a leader’s statements? Could it begin with “c” and rhyme with “ensor”?

Diamond went on to write that “Caputo and his team have attempted to add caveats to the CDC's findings,” and “halt the release of some CDC reports,” apparently when the CDC reports were not in line with what President Donald Trump had said or wanted. The article described actions taken by Paul Alexander, a senior adviser to Caputo, to stop publication of CDC reports until he has had an opportunity to review and line edit them. Who exactly is Alexander, besides someone with a last name that could be a first name, and what gives him the right to make such edits? After all, he is not exactly a known name when it comes to the science of pandemics.

Well, according to Nick Valencia and Kristen Holmes reporting for CNN, Caputo issued a statement in response that said: "Dr. Paul Alexander is an Oxford-educated epidemiologist and a methodologist specializing in analyzing the work of other scientists. Dr. Alexander advises me on pandemic policy and he has been encouraged to share his opinions with other scientists. Like all scientists, his advice is heard and taken or rejected by his peers."

OK, Oxford-educated can mean a lot of different things. A person can pay money to take a week-long course at Oxford and claim that he or she is Oxford-educated. Plus, the content of your education matters. For example, you can be Carnegie Mellon University-educated but your degree happens to be in bagpiping, which may be useful in some settings but not for pandemic policy.

What does a deeper dive reveal? A McMaster University website lists Alexander as an “Assistant Professor (Part-Time), Health Research Methods, Evidence, and Impact,” but doesn’t include much about his educational background. The 2019 ID Week conference website shows a Paul E. Alexander, MSc, MHSc, PhD, who obtained a masters degree from the University of Oxford. So perhaps that is what Caputo was referring to in his statement. Regardless, where you happened to get a degree doesn’t say anything about your current level of expertise.

The designation “methodologist” is vague as well. The Merriam Webster dictionary defines “methodologist” as a “student of methodology,” which is kind of like defining a “football player” as “one who plays football.” It further describes “methodology” as “a body of methods, rules, and postulates employed by a discipline : a particular procedure or set of procedures.” So this still could be anything. You could be a “meatball methodologist” or a “why-mac-and-cheese-is-yummy methodologist.”

Therefore, it’s not quite clear what Alexander’s real experience and expertise may be in pandemic policy making, infectious disease epidemiology, and other relevant fields. A number of established experts in such fields, though, were not happy to hear about Caputo’s and Alexander's possible interference with CDC scientific reporting. For example, Tom Inglesby, MD, the Director of the Center for Health Security of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, tweeted the following with Carlos del Rio, MD, a Distinguished Professor of Medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases responding:

Another longstanding infectious disease expert, David Fisman, MD, MPH, a Professor of Epidemiology at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health in Toronto, Canada, weighed in on Alexander's credentials:

Stevie Wonder has sung about how a part-time lover is different from a full-time lover. The same applies for faculty positions. It’s very different to be a full-time faculty member of a school or university versus a part-time faculty member. The latter is much easier to maintain.

According to Diamond, attempts to modify the CDC reports really began after HHS officials perceived that a May MMWR first authored by long-time CDC expert Anne Schuchat, MD would make the Trump administration look bad, that the Trump administration somehow moved too slowly to respond to the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic. That would mean that the Trump administration may have a COI, which in this case means “conflict of interest” and not “chickens on ice,” when trying to adjust what the CDC scientific reports say.

Here is something that needs to “hammered” home. If what Diamond reported is accurate, then this is a very concerning development. Correction, this is a very, very, very concerning development. The CDC and its scientists need to be able to communicate directly with the public without interference from the Trump administration. The CDC has many long-standing experts with very impressive and in some cases unparalleled experience. Scientists and public experts on the “outside” of CDC must be able to engage in an open discourse about emerging data and information on the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic to collectively come up with the most science-driven responses to do what’s best for the public. Ultimately, the CDC should serve the public and not the President (and so should the President).

That’s why “can’t touch this” should apply to the CDC MMWR. CDC’s scientific reports can’t be touched up by anyone who may have a political agenda.

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