On Wednesday, news broke that the Trump administration has ordered hospitals to bypass the CDC and send all COVID-19 related data to HHS. Per USA Today:
The Trump administration ordered hospitals to bypass the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and send all COVID-19 patient information to a central database in Washington, starting Wednesday, according to a Health and Human Services document updated July 10. Michael Caputo, HHS assistant secretary for public affairs, said in a statement the new coronavirus data collection system would be “faster,” and the CDC has a one-week lag in reporting hospital data.
“The President’s Coronavirus Task Force has urged improvements for months, but they cannot keep up with this pandemic,” he said. “Today, the CDC still provides data from only 85 percent of hospitals; the President’s COVID response requires 100 percent to report.”
Hospitals reporting coronavirus data to the Trump administration instead of the CDC is a bad idea, for a number of reasons.
Donald Trump would like nothing more than to ignore the coronavirus and pretend that everything is business as usual. The American people saw the lengths he would go to corrupt scientific data to fit his chosen narrative. Back in September of last year, he used a sharpie to alter a weather map to show that Hurricane Dorian would hit Alabama after the National Weather Service corrected one of his earlier tweets saying the hurricane would hit the state.
To make things worse, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) under the leadership of Neil Jacobs a Trump appointee issued a statement siding with Donald Trump and dismissing the correction from the National Weather Service.
War on science
Donald Trump has declared war on science because it does not align with his belief that this pandemic is pretty much over and the media and Democrats are hyping it to hurt his campaign. So why then should we believe that this time he will be truthful and those around him will be unbiased when they have a lot more to lose?
Collecting and reporting public health data is what the CDC is supposed to do. Taking away that core function and giving it to HHS headed by Trump’s yes man, Alex Azar, will likely result in a loss of objectivity in the data, further politizing the pandemic creating more chaos that will unnecessarily put the lives of health care providers and patients at risk.
Another thing, the American people are paying for this data. We should have access to this data and yet, there is no confirmation from the White House or HHS that that we will be able to so.
The administration and scientific agencies lead by Trump sycophants do not have a good track record of being objective. Taking the responsibility of collecting and reporting coronavirus data out of the hands of public health experts could severely impact the quality of the data and this could end up being another major problem in the Trump administration’s response to the coronavirus.
