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Clyburn issued subpoenas to Azar and Redfield, ordering them to produce documents by Dec. 30 that Clyburn said his panel has sought for months.
The panel’s probe into administration’s coronavirus response began in mid-September, shortly after a POLITICO story revealed how appointees meddled with the famed Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports, which are authored by career scientists and are typically free of political interference. In recent weeks, the panel released evidence alleging that Redfield ordered agency staff to delete an email that appeared to show political interference and that a political adviser repeatedly advocated a controversial “herd immunity” strategy regarded by most public health experts as reckless.
Clyburn’s subcommittee on Monday produced dozens of new documents detailing how Trump appointees — including then-science adviser Paul Alexander, the department’s top spokesperson Michael Caputo and other health department officials — worked to subvert the CDC’s MMWR reports.
Among the MMWRs that were targeted for edits: reports on the use of masks, the spread of Covid-19 in children, the virus’ transmission during an April 7 primary election in Milwaukee and other reports that were seen as politically sensitive.
The documents released by the subcommittee further detailed appointees’ extensive efforts to suppress and even write a rebuttal to planned reports on hydroxychloroquine, the malaria drug favored by President Donald Trump as a coronavirus treatment despite little evidence of its effectiveness. CDC has historically insisted that political appointees not review the draft content of the MMWRs, but in at least one case, Trump appointees obtained the full text of a pending report.
“I got the draft of the WWMR [sic.] about hydroxychloroquine and media that was supposed to be released on Tuesday,” then-CDC adviser Nina Witkofsky wrote on June 29 to Alexander, Caputo and Caputo’s aide Madeleine Hubbard.
Witkofsky, who served as a contractor helping plan events for Medicaid chief Seema Verma before joining the Trump administration this summer, was tapped in August to be the CDC’s acting chief of staff.
The MMWR on hydroxychloroquine, which reviewed how doctors prescribed the drug, was originally scheduled to be published on June 30 but was not published until Sept. 4.
Trump appointees further strategized on how to minimize the CDC’s findings, including writing their own in-house rebuttals to the agency. “The authors of this study are a disgrace to public service,” Alexander wrote in a planned rebuttal to the hydroxychloroquine report that does not appear to have been publicly released.
HHS and CDC did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Alexander and Witkofsky did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Caputo, who took medical leave the same day that Alexander left the department in September, has referred previous inquiries to HHS.
Bill Hall, the top career civil servant in the HHS press shop, on June 5 warned Alexander, Caputo and other officials that they should not interfere with the MMWRs, calling it a “peer-reviewed journal” akin to the Journal of the American Medical Association.
“[A]s matter of long-standing policy, we do not engage in clearing scientific articles, as that arena needs to remain an independent process,” Hall wrote in an email obtained by the subcommittee.
But the subcommittee’s documents reveal that political appointees instead kept trying to edit a series of internal and external reports.
“Hi Michael, is this not the article we were shelving?” Alexander wrote to Caputo and Witkofsky on June 29 about a pending CDC-authored report on hydroxychloroquine that was set to run in JAMA.
The subcommittee also released documents showing how Alexander repeatedly petitioned Charlotte Kent, the MMWR editor-in-chief, to make changes to planned reports, such as an upcoming MMWR on the spread of Covid-19 at a Georgia summer camp amid a robust debate about whether it was safe to reopen schools in the fall. In a separate email chain, CDC career officials discussed how best to navigate the political pressures, and Kent ultimately sent Alexander an email seeking to placate him.
“In response to thoughtful comments from CDC leadership and you, the opening sentence of Georgia’s report has been reframed,” Kent wrote to Alexander and other officials on July 28. “The opening sentence was the only reference to schools or institutions of higher learning in the report, and reference to them has been removed.”
However, the Georgia summer camp report still angered the health department’s Trump appointees, sparking another effort to author their own response that they believed would be more favorable to the president.
“I am not sure where it can be published but this has very re-assuring information and even for the White House,” Alexander wrote in a planned rebuttal to the report.
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