WASHINGTON (Washington Insider Magazine) – Dr. Bob Redfield, the former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, testified before the House committee on Friday that during the COVID-19 outbreak, former President Trump appointees frequently prevented his public health professionals from updating the American people.
The CDC’s attempts to talk publicly about what it understood about COVID and how individuals should keep safe were detailed by Redfield, reported ABC NEWS.
Furthermore, Redfield stated that the repercussions of the CDC’s failure to deliver knowledge to the public at that time had a negative influence on the people’s faith in the institution.
After his successor, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, was chosen for the post, he contacted her and vowed he would never attack her on the evening television programs.
Before Redfield’s remarks, the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) published a fresh report last week outlining claims of political meddling by HHS employees against the CDC, the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response, the National Institutes of Health, and the Food and Drug Administration.
Through a confidential phone line, interviewees said they had seen occurrences of political meddling but did not report them for a variety of reasons, such as fear of retaliation, lack of awareness about how to report the concerns, or the presumption that their leaders were already informed about the problems.
Some FDA and CDC responders stated that they believed probable political intervention had led to the “suppression” or “alteration” of scientific conclusions. Other respondents speculated that the possible political meddling they had observed may have led to politically driven changes to public health guidelines or the publishing of COVID-19-related scientific results being delayed.
In one case, a high ranking officer from the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response asserted that HHS fought back against him in May 2020 after he voiced concerns about improper political intervention in making hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine accessible to the public as COVID-19 treatments, according to GAO officials.
The research revealed that federal health authorities do not have proper processes in place that identify political influence in scientific decision-making, despite the fact that the departments had not filed any formal internal complaints of potential political involvement from 2010 to 2021. NIH is the sole agency that gives instructions on political involvement, despite the fact that all 4 agencies train personnel on various scientific-integrity-related issues.
HHS agreed with the suggestions to implement processes and training for reporting these claims of political involvement, according to GAO officials who completed their audit in April 2022.
