In the waning weeks of the Trump administration, two former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention officials have gone public over what they describe as unprecedented political interference and meddling that hampered the agency's COVID-19 response.
Kyle McGowan, a former chief of staff at the agency, and deputy chief of staff Amanda Campbell both left their posts at the agency's Atlanta headquarters earlier this year. In a series of interviews with The New York Times, the pair described how the White House and Trump administration officials undermined the agency's public health efficacy.
"Everyone wants to describe the day that the light switch flipped and the C.D.C. was sidelined. It didn't happen that way," McGowan told The Times. "It was more of like a hand grasping something, and it slowly closes, closes, closes, closes until you realize that, middle of the summer, it has a complete grasp on everything at the C.D.C."
The two former officials said they were tasked with fielding suggestions on school reopenings and health guidance for houses of worships from Trump administration officials, including the president's daughter Ivanka Trump and former White House counselor Kellyanne Conway, who have no medical or infectious disease expertise.
Recently, Ivanka tweeted, "These blanket lockdowns are not grounded in science. These arbitrary rules imposed by callous politicians are destroying lives. It is just wrong for small business owners to have fight so hard to keep their American dream alive." She was responding to news of a restaurant owner in Ventura, California, who was cited for keeping his business open in violation of a Los Angeles County order that halted in-person service during a surge in COVID-19 cases and deaths statewide.
McGowan and Campbell also told The Times that White House officials, like Russell Vought, directly interfered with and tried to "soften" the agency's guidance to be more favorable to business owners in order to align with their political and economic messaging around "reopening the economy."
"Every time that the science clashed with the messaging, messaging won," McGowan said.
McGowan and Campbell told The Times that White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and other officials advocated for cuts to the CDC budget amid COVID-19 stimulus talks.
The agency's budget shrank by $300 million and that money was diverted to an advertising campaign to promote the administration's pandemic response. Ultimately, however, that PR project didn't get off the ground because the Department of Health and Human Services failed to recruit enough high-profile celebrities, Politico reported.
In another instance of micromanaging, the White House demanded that the CDC remove from its website an app developed by the agency to help people evaluate themselves for COVID-19 symptoms. The administration had developed a similar app with Apple, prompting that directive, McGowan and Campbell said.
Throughout the pandemic, President Donald Trump has also directly undermined his own public health experts on repeated occasions. Most recently, he likened the US Food and Drug Administration to a "big, old, slow turtle" and reportedly threatened to fire the agency's commissioner, Dr. Stephen Hahn, for not granting emergency-use authorization to Pfizer's COVID-19 vaccine fast enough to his liking.
Trump also threatened to fire Dr. Nancy Messonnier, the director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at the CDC, after her blunt warnings about the severity of the coronavirus caused the stock market to plunge in February, The Wall Street Journal reported in April.
"It's not so much a question of if this will happen anymore but rather more a question of exactly when this will happen and how many people in this country will have severe illness," Messonnier said, warning that the COVID-19 outbreak would devolve into a pandemic.
The New York Times reported in April that Trump spent the plane ride home stewing in anger over both Messonnier's comments and the resulting stock market drop. He then called Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar "raging that Dr. Messonnier had scared people unnecessarily," The Times said.
The CDC held very few press conferences throughout 2020, and even refrained from giving clear and decisive guidance on important matters like holiday travel.
The agency didn't officially issue guidance encouraging Americans not to travel for Thanksgiving until a week before the holiday, after many had already made travel plans, gotten tested, or quarantined in advance of the holiday.
President-elect Joe Biden has tapped Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the chief of the infectious disease division at Massachusetts General Hospital and a professor at Harvard Medical School, to lead the agency.
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