Trump appointees tamper with renowned CDC publication, claiming that scientists are trying to “hurt the president”

Public relations staff installed by the Trump administration at the US Department of Health and Human Services have been seeking to edit or block the key weekly publication of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), claiming that its covid-19 reporting is aimed at hurting the president’s bid for re-election.

The top spokesman of the US health department, assistant secretary of public affairs Michael Caputo, and a scientific advisor he appointed sent peremptory emails to CDC director Robert Redfield demanding changes to the agency’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR), for decades a fixture of the US public health landscape.1

The emails were shared with the website Politico by three anonymous CDC whistleblowers.2 Redfield has resisted most changes so far, they said, but the public relations appointees have won their battle to see advance drafts of MMWR. Caputo later confirmed to the New York Times that his office had demanded, and in some cases obtained, changes to the weekly report.

The MMWR is the flagship publication of the CDC, described by one agency insider as the “holy of holies.” Required reading for US public health specialists, it was the first report to document the mysterious California pneumonia outbreak later identified as AIDS.3

Some of the sharpest demands made of Redfield came from a scientific advisor appointed by Caputo to the public affairs office—Paul Alexander, an assistant professor at McMaster University in Ontario who specialises in health research methods. In emails to Redfield, copied to other CDC officials, Alexander complained that the “CDC to me appears to be writing hit pieces on the administration,” and CDC scientists were trying to “hurt the president” in writing the MMWR.

“The reports must be read by someone outside of CDC, like myself, and we cannot allow the reporting to go on as it has been, for it is outrageous,” Alexander wrote. “Nothing to go out unless I read and agree with the findings how they, CDC, wrote it and I tweak it to ensure it is fair and balanced and ‘complete’.”

In another email Alexander called on Redfield to modify two already published reports which, the political appointee claimed, wrongly inflated the risks of coronavirus in children and undermined Trump’s push to reopen schools. “CDC tried to report as if once kids get together, there will be spread and this will impact school reopening,” he wrote. “Very misleading by CDC and shame on them. Their aim is clear.”

The CDC whistleblowers also told Politico that an MMWR report on hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine prescribing, published on 4 September,4 had been delayed for a month while Caputo and Alexander tried to stop its publication and questioned the political leanings of its authors.

Caputo, a former Trump campaign operative with no medical background, was installed as the health department’s communications chief in April, whereupon he deleted his Twitter history, in which he had called the media the “enemy of the people” and attacked Chinese users with taunts such as “Don’t you have a bat to eat?”5

But he has remained an internet firebrand. Two days after Politico’s report he accused CDC scientists of “sedition” in a live Facebook video. A “resistance unit” operated “in the bowels of the CDC,” said Caputo, claiming that the agency’s scientists spend their time plotting “how they’re going to attack Donald Trump next.”

“There are scientists who work for this government who do not want America to get well, not until after Joe Biden is president,” Caputo said. He also predicted violence at election time, telling Trump supporters to “buy ammunition.”

Caputo said that the pandemic had taken a toll on him, adding “my mental health has definitely failed.” “I don’t like being alone in Washington,” he said, describing “shadows on the ceiling in my apartment, there alone, shadows are so long.”

Caputo’s Facebook and Twitter accounts were deactivated later that day. Neither Caputo nor Alexander answered The BMJ’s requests for comment.