December 22 – House Democrats issued a subpoena to two senior White House health officials on the 21st, saying that the Trump administration appointees tried to change or block at least 13 coronavirus-related scientific reports through political intervention.
According to the United Press International News Agency on the 21st, James Clyburn, the majority whip of the U.S. Senate, said in a statement that the ad hoc subcommittee on the coronavirus crisis asked Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Aza and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CD). C) Director Redfield responded to the inquiry and noted that political interference in scientific work was “much broader and dangerous than previously known”.
Clayburn said that former HHS Assistant Secretary Michael Caputo, senior adviser Paul Alexander and other officials carried out an “action to intervene in CDC scientific reports, which was resisted by professionals, but the action was based on The old influence is extensive.
According to the report, the committee seized an email sent by Alexander indicating that he advocated a “herd immunity” policy against the virus in the summer and hoped that infants, children, adolescents, young people, middle-aged people and others would be unconditionally “infected by the virus”.
The committee also conducted a survey of editors and staff of the CDC Weekly Morbidity and Mortality (hereinafter referred to as “the Weekly”) and other scientific journals, and found that Alexander and Caputo attempted to intervene in the publication of articles and cooperated with Redfield to “shelve” articles indicating that the virus was spreading.
In another case, Alexander asked to change an article about the super-spreading event at Georgia summer camp in order to eliminate any suggestion that implied the use of data to assess whether schools should reopen.
In addition, Alexander asked the Weekly to revise another article, or the CDC completely stopped publishing the journal. The editor testified that Redfield advised her to “delete this email”.
“The heads of HHS and CDC have been passively handling the investigation,” the statement said.
In addition to not attending the committee meeting, the two senior officials deliberately provided inappropriate documents, and even included irrelevant information in the documents provided.
The subpoena requires agencies to present “complete and unedited documents” by December 30.
