Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, speaks as US President Donald Trump listens during the daily briefing of the coronavirus task force at the White House on April 22, 2020 in Washington, DC.
Drew Angerer | Getty Images
The Trump administration attempted to suppress Covid-19 testing in the United States last year by softening the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s guidelines on who should be tested, a House panel said Monday.
In August, the CDC revised its Covid-19 testing guidelines to say that people who have no symptoms “don’t necessarily need a test,” even if they were exposed to an infected person. The move received widespread criticism from public health specialists and politicians, who said that testing asymptomatic people is an important part of identifying and cutting distribution chains.
Deputy Health Administration Secretary Brett Giroir, who led the Trump administration’s testing efforts, at the time firmly denied allegations that the White House was pressuring health officials to change the guidelines.
But the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis on Monday released newly obtained emails from a politician within the Department of Health and Human Services indicating he was pushing for the new guidelines.
In the emails, former HHS scientific adviser Paul Alexander defended the change in testing policy and downplayed the importance of testing people without symptoms, saying it is “not the point of testing.” Alexander was brought to HHS by Michael Caputo, a longtime Trump ally who led the department’s communications last year before leaving abruptly after accusing CDC scientists of sedition.
“Testing asymptomatic people to look for asymptomatic cases is not the point of testing, because ultimately this is only achieved by quarantining asymptomatic people at low risk and preventing staff from working,” Alexander wrote a day after the change in CDC. the test guidelines were reported in an email to other HHS officials.
“In this light, based on the prevailing data, it would be unreasonable to have schools and colleges / universities tested on a large scale. This prevents them from reopening optimally,” he added, defending the policy change.
In September, the CDC quietly reversed the guidelines, saying that anyone, even those without symptoms, who has been in close contact with an infected person needs a Covid-19 test.
Representative James Clyburn, DS.C., chair of the committee investigating allegations of political influence in the country’s top health agencies under the Trump administration, said in letters reviewed by CNBC to the White House Chief of Staff, Ron Klain and Acting Secretary of HHS Norris Cochran that the emails are further evidence of political interference with the CDC under Trump.
The email, Clyburn said in the letters, “ shows that political appointees were involved in the decision to change the CDC’s guidelines, and that the Trump administration changed the guidelines with the explicit goal of reducing testing and virus to spread while the economy was rapidly reopening. . “
Clyburn added that the committee has requested more documents from the CDC and other agencies “to understand the full scope and impact of Trump’s White House efforts to suppress coronavirus testing.”
Alexander is central to the ongoing investigation into whether the administration of President Donald Trump or his appointees has allowed politics to shape the country’s response to the pandemic. In December, Clyburn published a wealth of emails from Alexander and Caputo, which Clyburn said showed “a damaging pattern of political interference by government officials.”