Former CDC Bosses Complain That Ivanka Kept Giving Them Unwanted Advice on Coronavirus Guidance [View all]

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Two top Trump appointees at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have spoken out for the first time about how the White House meddled in the agency’s work throughout the coronavirus pandemic. Kyle McGowan, a former chief of staff at the CDC, and his deputy, Amanda Campbell, both quit in August without explaining their reasons. In interviews with The New York Times published Wednesday, they described how the White House demanded changes to CDC advice based on science. They said Kellyanne Conway, the former White House adviser, gave unwanted advice on choirs and communion in religious communities, while Ivanka Trump offered suggestions for their guidance on schools. “Every time that the science clashed with the messaging, messaging won,” McGowan said.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/former-cdc-bosses-complain-that-ivanka-kept-giving-them-unwanted-advice-on-coronavirus-guidance

‘Like a Hand Grasping’: Trump Appointees Describe the Crushing of the C.D.C.

Kyle McGowan, a former chief of staff at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and his deputy, Amanda Campbell, go public on the Trump administration’s manipulation of the agency.

ATLANTA — Kyle McGowan, a former chief of staff at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and his deputy, Amanda Campbell, were installed in 2018 as two of the youngest political appointees in the history of the world’s premier public health agency, young Republicans returning to their native Georgia to dream jobs.

But what they witnessed during the coronavirus pandemic this year in the C.D.C.’s leadership suite on the 12-floor headquarters here shook them: Washington’s dismissal of science, the White House’s slow suffocation of the agency’s voice, the meddling in its messages and the siphoning of its budget.

In a series of interviews, the pair has decided to go public with their disillusionment: what went wrong, and what they believe needs to be done as the agency girds for what could be a yearslong project of rebuilding its credibility externally while easing ill feelings and self-doubt internally.

“Everyone wants to describe the day that the light switch flipped and the C.D.C. was sidelined. It didn’t happen that way,” Mr. McGowan said. “It was more of like a hand grasping something, and it slowly closes, closes, closes, closes until you realize that, middle of the summer, it has a complete grasp on everything at the C.D.C.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/16/us/politics/cdc-trump.html