Under Trump, coronavirus scientists can speak -- as long as they mostly toe the line
An internal White House “Covid Mail” email address, for instance, exists to receive queries and suggestions from “friends and family” as well as random individuals — including doctors and business owners — from around the country who have reached out to White House officials. Those emails then get farmed out to the appropriate agencies — from the Food and Drug Administration to the Department of Health and Human Services — but some officials have privately worried that these missives receive priority and distract from more crucial scientific pursuits.
In another instance, Nancy Messonnier, the CDC’s director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, was removed from her post as her agency’s coronavirus response head after sounding early alarms that Americans should begin preparing for “significant disruption” to their lives from a “severe illness.” The CDC held its last daily briefing on March 9 — a forum through which the nation would normally receive critical public health information — in part out of a desire not to provoke the president.
“I think the main media briefing has been the task force briefing,” Redfield said in his interview with The Post on Tuesday, asked about the now-defunct CDC briefing. “A lot of the flow of the briefings probably had to do with where the response was grounded.”
And Surgeon General Jerome Adams seemed to go out of his way to lavish praise on Trump in an interview on CNN last month, claiming the 73-year-old president was “healthier than what I am” — a comment the 45-year-old physician later walked back in a number of tweets.
“We hope that science and the public health experts are leading the politicians, that their voices are in the foreground, and that the politicians follow their advice,” said Matt Seeger, who has researched crisis and emergency risk communication for the past 35 years at Wayne State University. “But in this case, the political agenda seems to be setting the agenda for the subject matter experts, which is exactly the opposite of the way we would expect to have this happen.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/under-trump-coronavirus-scientists-can-speak--as-long-as-they-toe-the-line/2020/04/22/a0a67c12-84b9-11ea-878a-86477a724bdb_story.html
