WASHINGTON -- On June 30, as the coronavirus was cresting toward its summer peak, Dr. Paul Alexander, a new science adviser at the Department of Health and Human Services, composed a scathing two-page critique of an interview given by an experienced scientist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.Dr
WASHINGTON — On June 30, as the coronavirus was cresting toward its summer peak, Dr. Paul Alexander, a new science adviser at the Department of Health and Human Services, composed a scathing two-page critique of an interview given by an experienced scientist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Of Schuchat’s assessment of COVID-19’s dangers, he fumed, wrongly, “The risk of death in children 0-19 years of age is basically 0 … PERIOD … she has lied.” At the same time, Caputo moved to punish the CDC’s communications team for granting interviews to NPR and attempting to help a CNN reporter reach him about a public relations campaign. Current and former CDC officials called it a five-month campaign of bullying and intimidation.
On Friday, a department spokeswoman said Caputo, in his comments about interview approvals, had been trying to make sure that the CDC followed protocols dating to prior administrations that the department clear interview requests for health officials. The CDC did not have an immediate comment nor did Caputo.
In another email to an agency communications officer who had directed a CNN reporter to contact Caputo about a vaccine public relations campaign, Caputo shot back, “In what world did you think it was your job to announce an administration public service announcement campaign to CNN?” Perhaps most illuminating in the emails was the way the top officials at the CDC saw the illness in fundamentally different ways than confidants and loyalists of Trump. In the interview that provoked Caputo and Alexander, Schuchat referred to “a lot of wishful thinking around the country that, ‘Hey, summer, everything is going to be fine, we’re over this.’
That portrait of the virus was at odds with the one the White House had strained to present. The day Schuchat lamented there was “way too much virus across the country,” Kayleigh McEnany, the White House press secretary, told reporters, “we’re aware that there are embers that need to be put out.”
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