Yahoo News: After months of being silenced, CDC is easing back into public view. “On June 12, 2020, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention did something it had not done for months: It held a press briefing. Widely touted as the finest public health agency in the world, the CDC had been dormant since March 9, when one of its top officials held a teleconference with journalists.”
CDC
Pew: Three Months In, Many Americans See Exaggeration, Conspiracy Theories and Partisanship in COVID-19 News
Pew (PEW PEW PEW PEW PEW PEW PEW!- yes, I must do it here too.): Three Months In, Many Americans See Exaggeration, Conspiracy Theories and Partisanship in COVID-19 News. “As Americans continue to process a steady flow of information about the coronavirus outbreak – from changing infection and death rates to new testing protocols and evolving social distancing guidelines – they give the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other public health organizations the highest rating when it comes to getting the facts right. And they give Donald Trump and his administration the lowest rating for ‘getting the facts right’ among five key sources of COVID-19 information, according to a Pew Research Center survey of 9,654 U.S. adults conducted June 4-10, 2020, as part of the American News Pathways project.”
CNBC: CDC says U.S. has ‘way too much virus’ to control pandemic as cases surge across country
CNBC: CDC says U.S. has ‘way too much virus’ to control pandemic as cases surge across country. “The coronavirus is spreading too rapidly and too broadly for the U.S. to bring it under control, Dr. Anne Schuchat, principal deputy director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said Monday.”
Politico: Trump team weighs a CDC scrubbing to deflect mounting criticism
Politico: Trump team weighs a CDC scrubbing to deflect mounting criticism. “White House officials are putting a target on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, positioning the agency as a coronavirus scapegoat as cases surge in many states and the U.S. falls behind other nations that are taming the pandemic.”
Washington Post: CDC coronavirus test kits were likely contaminated, federal review confirms
Washington Post: CDC coronavirus test kits were likely contaminated, federal review confirms. “The test kits for detecting the nation’s earliest cases of the novel coronavirus failed because of ‘likely’ contamination at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, whose scientists did not thoroughly check the kits despite ‘anomalies’ during manufacturing, according to a new federal review. The review, conducted by two Department of Health and Human Services lawyers, also said there was ‘time pressure’ at the CDC to launch testing, and ‘lab practices that may have been insufficient to prevent the risk of contamination.’ The lawyers, from the department’s general counsel’s office, were not named.”
Yahoo News: Leaked CDC document contradicts Pence claim that U.S. coronavirus cases ‘have stabilized’
Yahoo News: Leaked CDC document contradicts Pence claim that U.S. coronavirus cases ‘have stabilized’. “Even as Vice President Mike Pence wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed published Tuesday that coronavirus cases in the U.S. ‘have stabilized,’ a document produced that same day by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and circulated to the other government agencies warns that infections in the U.S. have increased more than 18 percent.”
New York Times: The C.D.C. Waited ‘Its Entire Existence for This Moment.’ What Went Wrong?
New York Times: The C.D.C. Waited ‘Its Entire Existence for This Moment.’ What Went Wrong?. “The C.D.C., long considered the world’s premier health agency, made early testing mistakes that contributed to a cascade of problems that persist today as the country tries to reopen. It failed to provide timely counts of infections and deaths, hindered by aging technology and a fractured public health reporting system. And it hesitated in absorbing the lessons of other countries, including the perils of silent carriers spreading the infection. The agency struggled to calibrate its own imperative to be cautious and the need to move fast as the coronavirus ravaged the country, according to a review of thousands of emails and interviews with more than 100 state and federal officials, public health experts, C.D.C. employees and medical workers. In communicating to the public, its leadership was barely visible, its stream of guidance was often slow and its messages were sometimes confusing, sowing mistrust.”
Washington Post: White House and CDC remove coronavirus warnings about choirs in faith guidance
Washington Post: White House and CDC remove coronavirus warnings about choirs in faith guidance. “Two White House officials said the first version posted by the CDC was not approved by the White House. Once West Wing officials saw it, they asked the CDC to post a different cleared document without the choir references and other parts. The officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk about policy discussions, said there have long been concerns within the White House that there were too many restrictions on choirs. A CDC official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak about the guideline change also said the updated Saturday guidance was approved by the White House.”
AIDS .gov Blog: New COVID-19 CDC Resources on PrEP and Liver Disease
AIDS .gov Blog: New COVID-19 CDC Resources on PrEP and Liver Disease. “We continue to update COVID-19 and People with HIV, our HIV.gov page of resources from agencies across the federal government. We recently added two resources from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that are relevant for people with and at risk for HIV during the COVID-19 public health emergency.”
‘We’ve been muzzled’: CDC sources say White House putting politics ahead of science (CNN)
CNN: ‘We’ve been muzzled’: CDC sources say White House putting politics ahead of science. “In interviews with CNN, CDC officials say their agency’s efforts to mount a coordinated response to the Covid-19 pandemic have been hamstrung by a White House whose decisions are driven by politics rather than science. The result has worsened the effects of the crisis, sources inside the CDC say, relegating the 73-year-old agency that has traditionally led the nation’s response to infectious disease to a supporting role.”
The Atlantic: State and Federal Data on COVID-19 Testing Don’t Match Up
The Atlantic: State and Federal Data on COVID-19 Testing Don’t Match Up. “With the new CDC site, the federal government is providing regular testing data again, and for the first time ever, it is doing so on a state-by-state level. But an initial analysis of the CDC’s state-level data finds major discrepancies between what many states are reporting and what the federal government is reporting about them. In Florida, for example, the disparity is enormous. The state government reported on Friday that about 700,000 coronavirus tests have been conducted statewide since the beginning of the outbreak. This count should be authoritative: Governor Ron DeSantis has ordered hospitals and doctors to report their test results to the Florida Department of Health. Yet the CDC reported more than 919,000 tests in the state in that same period. That’s 31 percent more tests than Florida itself seems to think it has conducted.”
The Lancet: Reviving the US CDC
The Lancet: Reviving the US CDC. “The COVID-19 pandemic continues to worsen in the USA with 1·3 million cases and an estimated death toll of 80 684 as of May 12. States that were initially the hardest hit, such as New York and New Jersey, have decelerated the rate of infections and deaths after the implementation of 2 months of lockdown. However, the emergence of new outbreaks in Minnesota, where the stay-at-home order is set to lift in mid-May, and Iowa, which did not enact any restrictions on movement or commerce, has prompted pointed new questions about the inconsistent and incoherent national response to the COVID-19 crisis.”
Daily Beast: Team Trump Pushes CDC to Revise Down Its COVID Death Counts
Daily Beast: Team Trump Pushes CDC to Revise Down Its COVID Death Counts. “President Donald Trump and members of his coronavirus task force are pushing officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to change how the agency works with states to count coronavirus-related deaths. And they’re pushing for revisions that could lead to far fewer deaths being counted than originally reported, according to five administration officials working on the government’s response to the pandemic.”
Emails: Trump nominee involved in shelving CDC virus guide (Seattle Times)
Seattle Times: Emails: Trump nominee involved in shelving CDC virus guide. “A former chemical industry executive nominated to be the nation’s top consumer safety watchdog was involved in sidelining detailed guidelines to help communities reopen during the coronavirus pandemic, internal government emails show.”
AP Exclusive: Docs show top WH officials buried CDC report (Associated Press)
Associated Press: AP Exclusive: Docs show top WH officials buried CDC report. “The decision to shelve detailed advice from the nation’s top disease control experts for reopening communities during the coronavirus pandemic came from the highest levels of the White House, according to internal government emails obtained by The Associated Press. The files also show that after the AP reported Thursday that the guidance document had been buried, the Trump administration ordered key parts of it to be fast-tracked for approval. The trove of emails show the nation’s top public health experts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention spending weeks working on guidance to help the country deal with a public health emergency, only to see their work quashed by political appointees with little explanation.”
