Review: US Covid Oversight report, the political campaign to control the CDC

Politics "Trumped" Public Health

Oct 20, 2022

The US Covid Oversight committee has published its third report. The first detailed how individuals in the Trump administration sought to covertly implement a herd immunity strategy of mass infection. The second, “A knife fight with the FDA” covered how the Trump administration sought to pressure the FDA into approving Hydroxychloroquine.

The third report focuses on an unprecedented attack on the independence of the CDC, once again Paul Alexander and Scott Atlas are accused of undermining public health resulting in thousands of preventable deaths, and due to their corrosive influence the deaths continue to this day.

The executive summary sets out the many ways the Trump Administration sought to compromise the independence of the CDC.

I’ll go through each section of the report starting with the summary and picking out certain examples used, and at times make comparisons to the UK response.

Section 1

The section explains how Mike Pence and Michael Caputo sought to ensure messaging was positive and portrayed Trump in a good light, for example a report on the early spread of covid into the US from Europe was suppressed out of concerns Trump would be blamed for not closing the borders as he had to China.

In early April a telebriefing on Paediatric deaths and recommendations for masks was blocked by Pence.

At the same time in the UK Russel Viner’s systematic review on the role of children on transmission was making headlines and earned him an advisory role with the government. The review concluded children were less likely to be infected, were likely to be less infectious and schools didn’t play a significant role in transmission, the review has been quoted by various authorities around the world.

The legacy of the messaging from the UK and the US combined with the work of Tegnell and Ludvigsson in Sweden persists to this day and has likely played a role in the lower vaccine take up in younger age groups in many countries.

By May 2020 CDC scientists were saying they felt muzzled.

Trump’s White House briefings are covered in this section.

The appointment of Michael Caputo and Paul Alexander had a massive impact on the CDC.

April was also the same month the disinformation group Pandata formed. The times many members joined Pandata are unknown but a leaked internal file shows that in 2021 the membership included Paul Alexander and Scott Atlas alongside many of the key figures involved in covid disinformation from many countries.

Paul Alexander and his Pandata colleagues Peter McCullough, Rodger Hodkinson are also members of the Truth for Health Foundation. Truth for Health members include the founder and several other members of the Black Robe Regiment, a religious militia group linked to the Oathkeepers, Michael Flynn and Rodger Stone.

He is also part of the Brownstone Institute linked to the AIER, he is also involved in the Unity Project which was a sponsor of Defeat the Mandates. In Canada in Alexander was a key speaker for the Truckers Convey’s science council which hosted a press conference making all sorts of wild claims and references to conspiracy theories.

Before moving on its worth considering the networks which Alexander, Scott Atlas and the Great Barrington Declaration authors are part of.

Maps are the work of Allison Neitzel and Adrian Egli, @aliNeitzelMD and @adrian7745 on Twitter.

The report sets out how Caputo and Alexander’s desire to vet and control every piece of public information by repeatedly threatening CDC staff with formal disciplinary action. Truthful information was attacked due to not being politically helpful for Trumps re-election campaign, politics was prioritised ahead of public health.This is one of many examples provided by the report.

Another example once again was regarding the minimisation of the risk to children from covid,

Its worth noting that keeping schools open without mitigations is a key component of a mass infection strategy as well as being essential to a response that focuses on wealth before health as this frees up parents to return to work. This is what Tegnell said to colleagues in private emails obtained through freedom of information requests.

Alexander also sought to suppress the information that Trump’s efforts to strip away mitigation measures would have disproportionate impacts on certain communities.

In the UK SAGE regularly warned about the disproportionate impact of covid on certain communities, this was ignored by government while sections of the media argued measures needed to be removed for the benefit of the groups that were suffering directly from covid.

Alexander’s focus on politics not public health is clearly evidenced in the emails in the report.

Section 2

The disinformation groups are currently claiming they were censored and silenced, that governments gave up control to technocrats and bureaucrats, the accusations are made against the CDC in the US and SAGE in the UK. However what this report reveals is that it was the political appointees who silenced and censored the scientists. How do the likes of Brownstone Institute and Pandata continue to claim they were ignored when their colleagues Alexander and Atlas were inside the administration advancing their agenda?

Alexander appears to have accepted many of the CDC’s findings, he interfered for political purposes, which is interesting considering the number of contradictory claims he’s made to the followers of the many organisations hes involved with.

In the UK SAGE were regularly ignore while the editors of newspapers and members of disinformation groups had meetings behind closed doors with the government to lobby for policy changes.

The importance of asymptomatic testing was undermined in the US.

The CDC stopped producing guidance and instead were asked to review public health guidance drawn up by political appointees.

In the UK SAGE and Public Health weren’t responsible for drawing up guidance from the start of the pandemic. We don’t even know who wrote the schools guidance for schools in June and September 2020, a FOI response stated that there had been no meetings to discuss schools guidance in the Department of Education.

In May there was a push to re-open churches which included Kellyanne Conway making edits to guidance.

Getting the churches open was vital for Trump’s election campaign, the churches provide funding and are a powerful campaign machine for the Council for National Policy. They needed the churches full even if it meant putting the health of their own supporters at greater risk,

The same occurred in regards to restaurants and bars. In August the UK spent nearly a billion pounds on a subsidised meal scheme called Eat Out to Help Out which was found to have led to an increase in transmission before schools returned.

In the summer Scott Atlas’ interference in testing led to a dramatic decline and increased community transmission. “Stop testing and covid goes away,” was the catchphrase of Pandata members like Jay Bhattacharya in 2020, they got their way and covid didn’t disappear.

Section 3

This section covers how the Trump administration sought to use public health to turn away asylum seekers.

Section 4

This section provides examples of reports that were blocked or altered for political purposes. This includes a report that early transmission came from cases imported from Europe that was altered to focus on China instead.

A report into MIS-C an inflammatory response in children after covid infection that has resulted in deaths was delayed and suppressed. MIS-C / PIMS is still rarely discussed in much of the world, in some countries deaths from MIS-C are not categorised as deaths due to covid.

Continuing from the previous report on the FDA, this report examines the attempts by Alexander and Caputo to try and push through approval for hydroxychloroquine.

There is a huge conflict of interest regarding Alexander’s actions to push hydroxychlorquine. His Pandata colleague Peter McCullough was one of the first people to advocate alternative treatments, first producing an alternative pathway protocol in February 2020 which served as a template for Pierre Kory’s FLCCC. Alexander himself is a member of the Truth for Health Foundation that has now set up a church based telesales franchise to promote hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin.

Alexander and Caputo sought to suppress reports into hydroxychloroquine that had concluded it wasn’t effective, and then began attacking those behind the report.

This is a narrative Alexander has continued with since leaving his government position, accusing the authorities of allowing thousands of Americans to die by depriving them of these false treatments. It’s a rallying cry for those calling for Nuremberg 2.0 trials and the hanging of public officials like Anthony Fauci,

At the end of July Alexander sought to block a report on a large outbreak at a summer camp that demonstrated that children did transmit effectively.

In the UK and Sweden there were similar studies released claiming transmission wasn’t occurring in schools. In the UK, data from when students numbers were limited were used to claim that schools wouldn’t contribute to transmission when students returned in full and that measures to reduce transmission wouldn’t be required.

Alexander sought to downplay the risk of children transmitting, writing an op-ed reinterpreting the data as “very re-assuring.” By coincidence “reassuring” had become the catch phrase for one of the paediatricians working with the UK government who still claim the vast majority of children are infected outside of school.

Alexander tried to cover his tracks by forcing the destruction of evidence of his meddling.

In one incident a member of CDC staff made a hard copy before deleting emails under Alexander’s instructions.

What the report does show is that the political interference in public health was not simply a succession of individual incidents, this was an attempt to systematically dismantle the independence of the CDC with the aim of institutionalising political oversight.

Looking at the examples of interference we can see there is a clear focus in the summer on suppressing information regarding children and schools. The BMJ’s covid inquiry series on the UK’s response had a paper specifically on schools and children which accused the UK of relying on a narrow evidence base provided by a small group of professionals.

Even after action was taken and Alexander was removed from his position he continued to seek to interfere and influence.

Section 4

This is reminiscent of the UK Government giving millions of pounds to various organisations with links to the Conservative Party, example’s of this include a contract awarded without tendering to Public First which was found by the High Court to have been unlawful, huge payments to predominantly Conservative supporting newspapers and the Back to School campaign that paid TV celebrities and influences to support the full reopening of schools without the mitigations recommended by SAGE.

The UK government had a similar secret VIP lane for contracts such as PPE that awarded contracts without tendering to companies with links to the Conservative Party.