President Trump and his advisers have taken a more hands-on role than previously known in shaping Covid-19 recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, helping create a crisis of confidence in the nation’s top public-health agency.
The changes the White House has sought—in many cases successfully—go beyond the agency’s public messaging. White House advisers have made line-by-line edits to official health guidance, altering language written by CDC scientists on church choirs, social distancing in bars and restaurants as well as internal summaries of public-health reports, according to interviews with current and former agency and administration officials and their emails.
In one previously unreported Oval Office meeting, the president and top White House officials in May pressed CDC Director Robert Redfield to declare houses of worship essential and allow them to reopen. Later, they pushed to strip certain language from the guidance, current and former administration officials said. Both efforts were successful.
More recently, aides to Vice President Mike Pence asked Dr. Redfield to have agency officials publicly substantiate an assessment by Mr. Pence’s doctor that it was safe for him to participate in last week’s election debate with Sen. Kamala Harris. Some CDC staff members worried that the request, which Dr. Redfield honored, drew the agency into partisan politics.
The clashes stem in part from a turf war between a White House intent on controlling broad elements of the coronavirus response and federal agencies like the CDC who long prized their independence. Along with a series of missteps by the CDC itself, the sometimes-open tension has helped erode trust in the world’s pre-eminent public-health organization, compounding the difficulty of navigating a virus that has killed more than 216,000 Americans.
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