Members of the Trump administration have intimidated health officials and attempted to rewrite their reports in order to align them with the President’s statements, which minimized the epidemic crisis.
Le Monde
In order to go in the direction of the optimistic vision of the former American president, members of the team of Donald Trump when he was in the White House prevented health officials from providing certain information on the COVID-19, says a parliamentary report published Monday October 17.
senior officials of the prevention and combat centers (CDC), the main Federal Health Agency in the United States, investigators told that members of the Trump administration had intimidated staff and attempted to Rewrite their reports in order to align them with the president’s statements, which minimized the epidemic crisis.
Investigators interviewed ten former and current CDC officials, as well as senior government officials, for this 91-page report published by a Congress Commission leaning over the COVVI-19 crisis. The parliamentary panel describes how managers of the Ministry of Health, appointed by Donald Trump, tried to take control of the weekly scientific newspaper of CDCs, the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, by editing or censoring articles that they considered harmful For the Republican President.
These officials sought to “alter the content, contradict or delay the publication” of eighteen of these weekly reports, as well as a health alert, and this successfully five times, according to the parliamentary report.
“An unprecedented political interference campaign”
The commission’s investigation “showed that the previous administration has embarked on an unprecedented political interference campaign in the federal government’s response to the pandemic, which has undermined public health for the benefit of Political objectives of the former president, “said the President of the Commission, elected Democrat Jim Clyburn.
in a statement.
Previous reports had already highlighted the Trump administration attempts to censor high health officials or even put pressure on the American drug agency to issue an emergency authorization for hydroxychloroquine again. This drug against malaria was praised by Donald Trump as a remedy for COVID-19, despite the evidence of the opposite.
The Republicans rejected the conclusions of the report published on Monday, calling him a supporter, and promised to conduct their own investigation if they came to return to the majority of one of the Congress Chambers in the November elections.