Folks?
This has been a bareknuckle battle played out in the media for months…
The Health experts over at the CDC vs the Trump political machine in the White House…
Donald Trump…The American President has NEVER accepted that the Covid-19 virus has been killing tens of thousands of Americans…
He has done almost everything to ignore this fact…
His effort has been followed by several Sun Belt and Southern Governor’s who have record virus cases in their state’s because off their in actions…
Every time Trump tells the media things are Ok, or that we should ignore things?
The people over in the CDC challenge his advice….
Immunologist Dr. Anthony Fauci has been stowed away most of the time , and has recently come under direct attack from Trump people within the Trump admin and out….
We NOW hear that it what seems to be a cot of desperation , the Trump admin is cutting the CDC out its job of collecting virus infection data and switching that intake and reporting function to parent of the CDC….The Department of Health and Human Services, where the info will reside in a non-public data base! ..
You don’t have to be a genius to know that Trump political people will NOW be in charge of virus numbers…Not the experts that Trump has been fighting….
(Trump HATES any expert because they don’t do what HE wants them to do…A LOT of then have quit their government jobs rather than be a part of the Trump political machine operation)
The Trump administration has ordered hospitals to bypass the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and send all Covid-19 patient information to a central database in Washington beginning on Wednesday. The move has alarmed health experts who fear the data will be politicized or withheld from the public.
The new instructions were posted recently in a little-noticed document on the Department of Health and Human Services website. From now on, the department — not the C.D.C. — will collect daily reports about the patients that each hospital is treating, the number of available beds and ventilators, and other information vital to tracking the pandemic.
Officials say the change will streamline data gathering and assist the White House coronavirus task force in allocating scarce supplies like personal protective gear and remdesivir, the first drug shown to be effective against the virus. But the Health and Human Services database that will receive new information is not open to the public, which could affect the work of scores of researchers, modelers and health officials who rely on C.D.C. data to make projections and crucial decisions.
“Historically, C.D.C. has been the place where public health data has been sent, and this raises questions about not just access for researchers but access for reporters, access for the public to try to better understand what is happening with the outbreak,” said Jen Kates, the director of global health and H.I.V. policy with the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation.
“How will the data be protected?” she asked. “Will there be transparency, will there be access, and what is the role of the C.D.C. in understanding the data?”
News of the change came as a shock at the C.D.C., according to two officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter. Michael R. Caputo, a Health and Human Services spokesman, called the C.D.C.’s system inadequate and said the two systems would be linked. The C.D.C. would continue to make data public, he said.
“Today, the C.D.C. still has at least a week lag in reporting hospital data,” Mr. Caputo said. “America requires it in real time. The new, faster and complete data system is what our nation needs to defeat the coronavirus, and the C.D.C., an operating division of H.H.S., will certainly participate in this streamlined all-of-government response. They will simply no longer control it.”
But the instructions to hospitals in the department guidance is explicit and underscored: “As of July 15, 2020, hospitals should no longer report the Covid-19 information in this document to the National Healthcare Safety Network site,” the C.D.C.’s system for gathering data from more than 25,000 medical centers around the country.
Public health experts have long expressed concerns that the Trump administration is politicizing science and undermining its health experts, in particular the C.D.C.; four of the agency’s former directors, spanning both Republican and Democratic administrations, said as much in an opinion piece published Tuesday in The Washington Post. The data collection shift reinforced those fears….
Update on the CDC vs the health and Human Service Dept which seem to be more than just changing where data is….
While Democrats and health care groups spent Thursday blasting the Trump administration over the missing dashboards, which tracked critical data on coronavirus hospitalizations, officials at the Department of Health and Human Services insisted that they were just as shocked when the CDC’s data disappeared from public view.
“No one came out of our conversations believing that CDC was going to stop doing analysis,” said one administration official who was involved in plans for shifting the data-reporting responsibilities away from CDC. The official, who requested anonymity, said the 24-hour disappearance of the agency’s dashboards was an unwelcome surprise.
“All it did was feed into this narrative that we were cutting off the CDC when that’s not what happened at all,” the official said.
The flap over the missing CDC data is just the latest source of tension between the CDC and federal health officials that’s contributed to a fragmented response to the pandemic. CDC officials have complained they’ve been unusually sidelined during the crisis as President Donald Trump pushes for faster reopenings, while White House officials contend they’re being forced to work around the agency’s weak spots.
The health department took credit for restoring the CDC dashboards Thursday and said it was committed to transparency. “Going forward, HHS and CDC will deliver more powerful insights on the coronavirus, powered by HHS Protect,” said spokesperson Michael Caputo, referencing the new data-reporting system that relies on outside vendors who have received at least $35 million combined. The CDC did not respond to multiple inquiries.
Inside the health department, staff gave conflicting explanations for the agency’s decision to pull its dashboards offline. Three officials characterized it as a flash of frustration with HHS’ order to shift management of coronavirus data away from the CDC. One official said the agency took down the dashboards just to update the system but failed to notify HHS ahead of time.
But they acknowledged that the health department’s turf battles, which are now playing out in a very public way, are hampering the government’s response to a pandemic that has claimed about 140,000 lives in the U.S. and is still surging in many parts of the country…..
More…