President Trump, arguably the worst president in American history, is continuing his presidential practice of being messy AF as he’s now ordering that hospitals not to send their COVID-19 information to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, but instead, to send it right to the White House, where the official shredder of documents that make the White House look bad, Jared Kushner, will promptly “file” them away.
OK, they aren’t sending it directly to the White House; they are being asked to send it to a central database in Washington, starting Wednesday, USA Today reports.
“The President’s Coronavirus Task Force has urged improvements for months, but they cannot keep up with this pandemic,” Michael Caputo, HHS assistant secretary for public affairs, said in a statement, adding that this new data collection would be faster. “Today, the CDC still provides data from only 85 percent of hospitals; the President’s COVID response requires 100 percent to report.”
Caputo added: “The CDC, an operating division of HHS, will certainly participate in this streamlined all-of-government response. They will simply no longer control it.”
And that is the part that scares me the most. If the CDC isn’t controlling this data, then who are we supposed to depend on in the Trump administration to ensure that the data is properly handled and accurate? This is the same administration that keeps trying to act like all of this is a hoax.
Public health experts agree with me—because I agree with common sense—and believe that this is just some more of Trump’s bullshit that will further politicize the pandemic and will hurt frontline workers and patients.
“Placing medical data collection outside of the leadership of public health experts could severely weaken the quality and availability of data, add an additional burden to already overwhelmed hospitals and add a new challenge to the U.S. pandemic response,” Dr. Thomas File, president of the Infectious Diseases Society of America, said in a statement, USA Today reports.
Not to mention that one of the core functions of the CDC is to collect and report public health data. Bypassing that essentially undermines “our nation’s public health experts.”
“As infectious diseases physicians, front-line providers and scientists, we urge the administration to follow public health expertise in addressing this public health crisis,” File said.
Former U.S. Surgeon General Dr. David Satcher called the sidelining of the agency “very scary.”
“There is conflict right now between the CDC and the White House,” Satcher said during a video meeting Wednesday with the USA TODAY editorial board. “Somehow we’ve got to get past the conflict in the interest of saving lives.”
I don’t want to sound gloomy, but how is this not the end of the world as we know it?