In the Latest Terrifying Turn, Coronavirus Data Will Now Be Sent Directly to Trump’s Administration Instead of the CDC

The Center for Disease Control receives daily coronavirus reports from hospitals across the country, though according to a document quietly posted to the Department of Health and Human Services, that has suddenly changed. Starting today, that data will go directly to that department, not the CDC. This is an extremely troubling move.

If you believe the Trump administration (HA!), this change is designed to streamline the system of collecting and utilizing data needed to fight COVID-19. Michael Caputo, the assistant secretary for public affairs at the HHS said in a statement that the CDC will still “participate” in the flow of data–”They will simply no longer control it.”

If you do not believe the Trump administration, this is yet another gigantic step in controlling, hiding, and politicizing coronavirus data. Trump has repeatedly expressed displeasure with the country’s rate of testing, claiming that if we didn’t test so much, our number of reported cases wouldn’t be so high.

For the 1/100th time, the reason we show so many Cases, compared to other countries that haven’t done nearly as well as we have, is that our TESTING is much bigger and better. We have tested 40,000,000 people. If we did 20,000,000 instead, Cases would be half, etc. NOT REPORTED!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 9, 2020

If the Trump administration thinks that suppressing the data would make them and specifically him look good, then it seems obvious that they will suppress the hell out of that data.

So…Trump complains that the issue is that we’ve got too MUCH testing (we do not) and that’s why the numbers are bad (that’s not why) and then hides this in a “little noticed document” on the CDC site that hospitals gotta skip the CDC and send data straight to HHS?

WHUT?! pic.twitter.com/tZbhIxMMB8

— brittany packnett cunningham does not do remixes. (@MsPackyetti) July 15, 2020

This is also going to make things incredibly difficult for researchers, health officials, reporters, and so many others who rely on that data in their own work to fight the virus directly or keep the public informed, since the HHS does not make their data available to the public.

As you might expect from the Trump administration, there’s also a sketchy monetary element to this whole shift. Last month, Senator Patty Murray, the ranking member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee, raised questions about TeleTracking, a health data firm that the HHS had previously instructed the CDC to use instead of their own, very similar, data collecting methods.

Murray had questions about “the Trump Administration’s decision to award a multimillion dollar contract on a non-competitive basis to create a seemingly duplicative data collection system” as do many others.

The New York Times writes:

Both the C.D.C. network and the TeleTracking system set up by Health and Human Services rely on so-called push data, meaning hospital employees must manually enter data, rather than the government tapping into an electronic system to obtain the information.

“The whole thing needs to be scrapped and started anew,” said Dr. Dan Hanfling, an expert in medical and disaster preparedness and a vice president at In-Q-Tel, a nonprofit strategic investment firm focused on national security. “It is laughable that this administration can’t find the wherewithal to bring 21st-century technologies in data management to the fight.”

So not only is this shift potentially totally corrupt–it’s corrupt and ineffectual. The ol’ Trump standard.

(via CNN, image: Anna Moneymaker-Pool/Getty Images)

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