Team Trump Pushes CDC to Dial Down COVID Death Counts
Trump wants to change the facts once more - he’s trying to talk the CDC into revising numbers downward even though we know that Covid-19 deaths aren’t all being reported as such (see this NYT article from April.)
This is one of the more evil things that Donald has done since entering office - he treats the people working for our agencies and our institutions like they are all subservient to King Trump & as if this were some feudal kingdom and not a democratic republic. His enabling cronies in the Senate let him get away with it too, because they also have mean anti-government streaks that are a mile wide. When you subvert and corrupt our institutions and agencies for political convenience then you lower trust in them and cripple their effectiveness — we can’t afford that in time of war when people are dying, and we can’t afford that in time of pandemic when people are dying.
President Donald Trump and members of his coronavirus task force are pushing officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to change how the agency works with states to count coronavirus-related deaths. And they’re pushing for revisions that could lead to far fewer deaths being counted than originally reported, according to five administration officials working on the government’s response to the pandemic
Though he has previously publicly attested to the accuracy of the COVID-19 death count, the president in recent weeks has privately raised suspicion about the number of fatalities in the United States, which recently eclipsed 80,000 recorded deaths. In talks with top officials, Trump has suggested that those numbers could have been incorrectly tallied or even inflated by current methodology, two individuals with knowledge of those private comments said.