Members of Donald Trump’s team when he was in the White House prevented health officials from providing certain information about Covid-19, in order to go in the direction of the former US president’s optimistic view, says a parliamentary report published this Monday. .
Senior officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the main federal health agency in the United States, told investigators that members of the Trump administration intimidated staff and tried to rewrite their reports to bring them in line. with the statements. of the president, who downplayed the epidemic crisis.
Censorship of various articles
Researchers interviewed a dozen current and former CDC officials, as well as top government officials, for this 91-page report released by a congressional committee investigating the COVID-19 crisis.
In it, the parliamentary panel describes how officials from the Department of Health, appointed by Donald Trump, tried to take control of the CDC’s weekly scientific journal, The Weekly Morbidity and Mortality Reportediting or censoring articles that they considered detrimental to the Republican president.
These officials have sought to “alter the content, contradict or delay the publication” of 18 of these weekly reports, as well as a health alert, and have succeeded five times, according to the parliamentary report.
The commission’s investigation “showed that the previous administration embarked on an unprecedented campaign of political interference in the federal government’s response to the pandemic, which undermined public health in favor of the political objectives of the former president,” said the president of the committee, he chose Democrat Jim Clyburn, in a press release.
Republicans rejected the report’s findings on Monday, calling it partisan, and vowed to conduct their own investigation if they regain a majority in either house of Congress in the November election.
Source: BFM TV
