Trump appointees in the Department of Health and Human Services last year privately touted their efforts to block or alter scientists’ reports on the coronavirus to more closely align with then-President Donald Trump’s more optimistic messages about the outbreak, according to the Washington Post, citing newly released documents from congressional investigators.
According to the report, Paul Alexander, a pro-Trump science adviser boasted in an email to then-HHS public affairs chief Michael Caputo about getting the CDC to change two reports to reflect Donald Trump’s upbeat messaging about the virus.
“[S]mall victory but a victory nonetheless and yippee!!!,” he wrote. Other emails show the pair’s attempts to alter messaging around COVID to better suit Trump’s agenda.
Caputo and Alexander also discussed how the science adviser teamed up with controversial doctor, Scott Atlas to alter a weekly CDC report about death from COVID in younger Americans. They also discussed the idea of fabricating numbers about the rate of suicides amid the pandemic to make the reality seemed worst than it was .
Caputo left HHS after he made bizarre rants about COVID conspiracies.
