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- Secretary Blinken’s Call with United Arab Emirates Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan – United States Department of State Department of State
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‘Jealous of Her Stardom’: Friends of Kanye West’s Wife, Bianca Censori, Describe Her as a ‘Thirsty Lost Cause’ Who Cares More About Fame Than Friendship – Yahoo Entertainment
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Freed Ukrainian POWs describe life in Russian captivity | 60 Minutes – CBS News
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- Ukrainian soldiers castrated by drunk Russian captors: The Times Business Insider
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Our language is inadequate to describe quantum reality
This is the fifth in a series of articles exploring the birth of quantum physics.
“Heaven knows what seeming nonsense may not tomorrow be demonstrated truth.”
This is how the great mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead expressed his frustration with the onslaught of weirdness coming from the emerging quantum physics. He wrote this in 1925, just as things were getting truly strange. At the time, light had been shown to be both particle and wave, and Niels Bohr had introduced a strange model of the atom that showed how electrons were stuck in their orbits. They could only jump from one orbit to another by either emitting photons to go to a lower orbit or absorbing them to go to a higher orbit. Photons, for their part, were particles of light that Einstein conjectured to exist in 1905. Electrons and light danced to a very unique tune.
When Whitehead spoke, the wave-particle duality of light had just been extended to matter. In trying to understand Bohr’s atom, Louis De Broglie proposed in 1924 that electrons were also both wave and particle, and that they fit in their atomic orbits like standing waves — the kind you get by vibrating a string with one end fixed. Everything waves, then, although the waviness of objects quickly becomes less apparent with increasing size. For electrons this waviness is crucial. It is much less important to, say, a baseball.
Quantum liberation
Two fundamental aspects of quantum theory arise from this discussion, and they are radically different from traditional classical reasoning.
First, images we build in our minds when we try to picture light or particles of matter are not appropriate. Language itself struggles to address quantum reality, since it is limited to verbalizations of those mental images. As the great German physicist Werner Heisenberg wrote, “We wish to speak in some way about the structure of atoms and not only about the ‘facts’… But we cannot speak about the atoms in ordinary language.”
Second, the observer is no longer a passive player in the description of natural phenomena. If light and matter behave as particles or waves depending on how we set up the experiment, then we cannot separate the observer from what is being observed.
In the world of the quantum, the observer plays a crucial role in determining the physical nature of what is being observed. The notion of an objective reality, existing independently of an observer — a given in classical physics and even in relativity theory — is lost. To a certain extent that is contentious; the world out there, at least within the realm of the very small, is what we choose it to be. Richard Feynman said it best:
“Things on a very small scale behave like nothing you have any direct experience about. They do not behave like waves, they do not behave like particles, they do not behave like clouds, or billiard balls, or weights on springs, or anything that you have ever seen.”
Given the bizarre nature of the quantum world, progress could only be made through radically new approaches. In the interval of two years in the 1920s, a brand new theory of the quantum was invented. This was quantum mechanics, which could describe the behavior of atoms and their transitions without invoking classical pictures such as billiard balls and miniature solar systems. In 1925, Heisenberg produced his remarkable “matrix mechanics,” a completely new way of describing physical phenomena.
Heisenberg’s construct was a brilliant liberation from the limitations imposed by classically inspired imaging. It did not include particles or orbits, only numbers describing electronic transitions in atoms. Unfortunately, it was also notoriously hard to calculate with — even for the simplest atom, hydrogen. Enter another brilliant young physicist. (There were lots of them around in those days, all in their 20’s and under Bohr’s tutelage.) The Austrian Wolfgang Pauli showed how matrix mechanics could be used to obtain the same results as Bohr’s model for the hydrogen atom. In other words, the quantum world called for a mode of description completely foreign to our everyday intuition.
The only certainty is uncertainty
In 1927, Heisenberg followed his new mechanics with a profound breakthrough into the nature of quantum physics, further distancing it from classical physics. This is the famous Uncertainty Principle. It asserts that we cannot know the values of certain pairs of physical variables (like position and velocity, or better, momentum) with arbitrary accuracy. If we try to improve our measure of one of the two, the other becomes more inaccurate. Note that this limitation is not due to the act of observing, as it is sometimes said. Heisenberg, trying to create an image to explain the mathematics of the Uncertainty Principle, claimed that if we, say, shine light into an object to see where it is, the light itself will push it away and its position will be imprecise. That is, the act of observing interferes with what is observed.
Although this is true, it is not the origin of quantum uncertainty. The uncertainty is built into the nature of quantum systems, an expression of the elusive wave-particle duality. The smaller the object — that is, the more localized it is in space — the larger the uncertainty in its momentum is.
Again, the issue here is to explain in words a behavior that we have no intuition for. The math, however, is very clear and effective. In the world of the very small, everything is fuzzy. We cannot attribute shapes to objects in that world as we are used to doing for the world around us. The values of these objects’ physical quantities — values such as position, momentum, or energy — are not knowable beyond a level dictated by Heisenberg’s relation.
Knowability, understood here as the possibility of having absolute knowledge of something, becomes more tenous than abstraction in the quantum world. It becomes an impossibility. For the interested, Heisenberg’s expression for position and momentum of an object is ∆x ∆p ≥ h/4π, where ∆x and ∆p are the standard deviations of position x and momentum p, and h is Planck’s constant. If you try to decrease ∆x, that is, increase your knowledge of where the object is in space, you decrease your knowledge of its momentum. (In objects moving slowly with respect to light, the momentum is just mv, mass times the velocity.)
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Quantum uncertainty was a devastating blow to those who believed that science could provide a deterministic description of the world: that action A causes reaction B. Planck, Einstein, and de Broglie were incredulous. So was Schrödinger, the hero of the wave description of quantum physics, which we will address in a coming week. Could nature be this absurd? After all, Heisenberg’s relation was telling the world that even if you knew the initial position and momentum of an object with infinite precision, you wouldn’t be able to predict its future behavior. Determinism, the cornerstone of the classical worldview of mechanics, of planets orbiting stars, of objects falling predictably to the ground, of light waves propagating in space and reflecting from surfaces, had to be abandoned in favor of a probabilistic description of reality.
This is where the real fun begins. It is when the worldviews of giants such as Einstein and Bohr clash amid uncertainty’s new hold on the nature of reality. About one century ago, the world, or at least our grasp of it, became something else altogether. And the quantum revolution was only beginning.
An employee had a gun to her forehead, others ran for their lives: Witnesses describe the Chesapeake Walmart shooting
CNN
—
Though Jessie Wilczewski had only been working at the Chesapeake, Virginia, Walmart for a few days, her Tuesday night shift started like all the rest, with a routine team meeting in the break room.
But moments after that meeting began, Wilczewski found herself face to face with her team leader, who held a gun to her forehead after having shot her coworkers.
She managed to escape and make it back home to her 15-month-old, but she told CNN the night – and the sound of blood hitting the floor – keeps replaying in her head.
Six of her colleagues – including a teenager – were killed in the massacre after the gunman, who Chesapeake city officials identified as 31-year-old Andre Bing, began indiscriminately firing into the room where employees had gathered for a meeting.
According to a statement from Walmart, Bing, was a “team lead” for the store’s overnight shift and had been employed with the company since 2010. Police say he died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
“It’s horrible because it doesn’t stop. It doesn’t stop replaying when you leave the scene, it doesn’t stop hurting as much, it doesn’t stop,” Wilczewski told CNN’s Erica Hill Wednesday night after recounting the horrifying experience.
Five of the deceased victims were identified by city officials as Lorenzo Gamble; Brian Pendleton; Kellie Pyle; Randall Blevins; and Tyneka Johnson. The sixth deceased victim was a 16-year-old boy who authorities are not naming because he was a minor, the city said. They were all Walmart employees, a company spokesperson told CNN.
Wilczewski told CNN she noticed the shooter shortly after 10 p.m. She was listening to another team lead speak before she turned her head toward the doorway and saw Bing standing with a gun pointed at the crowd – an image she says at first didn’t register as real.
But then she began to feel her chest vibrating and her ears ringing as a stream of gunshots erupted, she said. Wilczewski leaped under a table while the gunman walked off down a nearby hallway.
“I didn’t want to be loud, I didn’t want him to hear me and make him mad and make him come back,” Wilczewski told CNN.
Around her, some coworkers were on the floor, while others were laying on chairs – all still. She said she knew many were likely not alive but Wilczewski stayed because she didn’t want to leave them alone.
“The sound of the droplets (hitting the floor),” she said, “It replays, and replays and replays and replays.”
When he came back, Wilczewski said the gunman told her to get out from under the table. She obeyed, putting her bag out first to indicate she didn’t have a weapon, and raised her arms.
“I slid from out underneath the table and I was shaking,” she said. “He just had the gun up to my forehead.”
And then, he told her to go home, pulling the gun away and aiming it at the ceiling.
“I got up real slow and I tried not to look at everybody on the ground … and I had to touch the door which was covered (in blood) and I walked out the double doors to where you can see the aisles of Walmart and … I just remember gripping my bag and thinking, ‘If he’s going to shoot me in the back, well he’s going to have to try really hard cause I’m running,’ and I booked it,” she said. “I booked it and I didn’t stop until I got to my car and then I had a meltdown.”
Employee Jalon Jones, 24, also ran out of the store to safety, after getting shot in his back. Jones’ mother, Kimberly Shupe, spoke to CNN affiliate WTKR Wednesday outside of the hospital where her son was in the ICU.
Shupe said her son recounted to her that what started as a normal day at work quickly changed when he saw the team leader’s gun and a bullet grazed Jones’ ear.
“That’s when he realized that he was being shot,” Shupe said. Jones made it to the front of the store, and when he got there, he was shot again, she said.
“That’s when he received help from another coworker that took him outside to her vehicle until the medics showed up,” Shupe said.
Briana Tyler was also a new hire at the store. She had clocked into work shortly after 10 p.m. when she saw Bing standing in the doorway.
“Everybody was just waiting to, you know, figure out where they were going for the night and then all of a sudden you just hear ‘pa pa pa pa pa pa pa,’” Tyler told CNN.
After he started shooting, Bing didn’t speak or point the gun at anyone in particular, Tyler recalled.
“He just had a blank stare on his face and he just literally just looked around the room and just shot and there were people just dropping to the floor,” Tyler said.
It was a horrifying sight that’s been seared into her mind since.
“The two visions I can’t get out of my head are the vision of him shooting the gun and the smoke leaving,” Tyler said. “I’m watching the smoke leave the barrel of the gun and my friend bleeding out from her neck.”
The gunman continued shooting throughout the store, Tyler said, while everyone around her was screaming. She, too, couldn’t believe what was happening, until she saw injured friends on the ground and made a run for it.
“As I was running, it was just run, don’t trip, don’t fall, just run,” she said. “And I just knew I had to make it home to my son and as soon as I made it outside, I just called my mom.”
Donya Prioleau, who told CNN she’d heard Bing say “a lot of disturbing things” in the past, was also in the break room when the gunman entered.
Bing walked in and shot three of her friends “before I took off running. Half of us didn’t believe it was real until some of us saw all the blood on the floor,” she said.
Two slain victims and the shooter were found in the break room, while another was found at the front of the store, the city of Chesapeake said. Three others died at the hospital, officials said.
At least six more people were transported to local hospitals for treatment, one of whom remained in critical condition Wednesday, city officials said. Authorities were also working to determine whether there were any additional injuries that were self-reported.
Hear from Chesapeake police on what we know about Walmart shooting
Employee Kevin Harper narrowly missed an encounter with the gunman.
“I just left out the break room,” Harper says in a video posted to Facebook.
“(The gunman) just come in there, started capping people up in there. Started shooting, bro. … As soon as I left out the break room, he went in there, man. By the grace of God, yo,” Harper says, acknowledging his fortune in not being injured or worse.
Harper thought it was nothing at first but soon realized something was awry and fled, he says on the video, which appears to have been filmed in the store’s parking lot.
“Then, I started hearing him getting closer so … I booked it. I seen everybody run. I booked it, too,” he said. “I got up out of there.”
As he records, a woman in the background is heard telling him she played dead during the attack. Others join in the discussion, sharing information on those killed.
“He killed the girl in there and everything,” Harper says. “He came in there and just started spraying and s**t. … I’m sorry for the victims.”
The city said the shooter was armed with a handgun and multiple magazines. Police were working Wednesday to find out more about the suspect’s background and identify a possible motive.
Wilczewski said she thinks about how else she could have helped, how she could have changed Tuesday night’s outcome and wonders why the shooter let her go.
“It bothers me really, really bad. I don’t know why he did what he did,” she told CNN. “Because I could have sworn I was a goner.”
She also shared a message for the families of the two female victims, though she didn’t name them.
“I want to let you know, I could have ran out that door with everybody else that ran out that door and I stayed. I stayed so they wouldn’t be alone in their last moments,” she said. “I stayed, just so they wouldn’t be alone.”
They call it ‘The Hole’: Ukrainians describe horrors of Kherson occupation
KHERSON, Ukraine, Nov 16 (Reuters) – Residents in Ukraine’s southern city of Kherson call the two-storey police station “The Hole”. Vitalii Serdiuk, a pensioner, said he was lucky to make it out alive.
“I hung on,” the retired medical equipment repairman said as he recounted his ordeal in Russian detention two blocks from where he and his wife live in a tiny Soviet-era apartment.
The green-roofed police building at No. 3, Energy Workers’ Street, was the most notorious of several sites where, according to more than half a dozen locals in the recently recaptured city, people were interrogated and tortured during Russia’s nine-month occupation. Another was a large prison.
Two residents living in an apartment block overlooking the police station courtyard said they saw bodies wrapped in white sheets being carried from the building, stored in a garage and later tossed into refuse trucks to be taken away.
Reuters could not independently verify all of the events described by the Kherson residents.
The Kremlin and Russia’s defence ministry did not immediately respond to questions about Serdiuk’s account or that of others Reuters spoke to in Kherson.
Moscow has rejected allegations of abuse against civilians and soldiers and has accused Ukraine of staging such abuses in places like Bucha.
On Tuesday, the U.N. human rights office said it had found evidence that both sides had tortured prisoners of war, which is classified as a war crime by the International Criminal Court. Russian abuse was “fairly systematic”, a U.N. official said.
As Russian security forces retreat from large swathes of territory in the north, east and south, evidence of abuses is mounting.
Those held in Kherson included people who voiced opposition to Russia’s occupation, residents, like Serdiuk, believed to have information about enemy soldiers’ positions, as well as suspected underground resistance fighters and their associates.
Serdiuk said he was beaten on his legs, back and torso with a truncheon and shocked with electrodes wired to his scrotum by a Russian official demanding to know the whereabouts and unit of his son, a soldier in the Ukrainian army.
“I didn’t tell him anything. ‘I don’t know’ was my only answer,” the 65-year-old said in his apartment, which was lit by a single candle.
‘Remember! Remember! Remember!’ was the constant response.”
‘PURE SADISM’
Grim recollections of life under occupation in Kherson have followed the unbridled joy and relief when Ukrainian soldiers retook the city on Friday after Russian troops withdrew across the Dnipro River.
President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said two days later that investigators had uncovered more than 400 Russian war crimes and found the bodies of both servicemen and civilians in areas of Kherson region freed from Russian occupation.
“I personally saw five bodies taken out,” said Oleh, 20, who lives in an apartment block overlooking the police station, declining to give his last name. “We could see hands hanging from the sheets and we understood these to be corpses.”
Speaking separately, Svytlana Bestanik, 41, who lives in the same block and works at a small store between the building and the station, also recalled seeing prisoners carrying out bodies.
“They would carry dead people out and would throw them in a truck with the garbage,” she said, describing the stench of decomposing bodies in the air. “We were witnessing sadism in its purest form.”
Reuters journalists visited the police station on Tuesday but were prohibited from going beyond the courtyard, rimmed by a razor wire-topped wall, by armed police officers and a soldier who said that investigators were inside collecting evidence.
One officer, who declined to give his name, said that up to 12 detainees were kept in tiny cages, an account corroborated by Serdiuk.
Neighbours recounted hearing screams of men and women coming from the station and said that whenever the Russians emerged, they wore balaclavas concealing all but their eyes.
“They came in the shop every day,” said Bestanik. “I decided not to talk to them. I was too afraid of them.”
RESISTANCE FIGHTERS
Aliona Lapchuk said she and her eldest son fled Kherson in April after a terrifying ordeal at the hands of Russian security personnel on March 27, the last time she saw her husband Vitaliy.
[1/7] Vitalii Serdiuk, 65, who says he was tortured by Russian service members, and his wife Olena speak during an interview with Reuters after Russia’s retreat from Kherson, Ukraine, November 15, 2022. REUTERS/Valentyn Ogirenko
Vitaliy had been an underground resistance fighter since Russian troops seized Kherson on March 2, according to Lapchuk, and she became worried when he did not answer her phone calls.
Soon after, she said, three cars with the Russian “Z” sign painted on them pulled up at her mother’s home where they were living. They brought Vitaliy, who was badly beaten.
The soldiers, who identified themselves as Russian troops, threatened to smash out her teeth when she tried to berate them. They confiscated their mobile phones and laptops, she said, and then discovered weapons in the basement.
They beat her husband in the basement savagely before dragging him out.
“He didn’t walk out of the basement; they dragged him out. They broke through his cheek bone,” she said, sobbing, in the village of Krasne, some 100 km (60 miles) west of Kherson.
Lapchuk and her eldest son, Andriy, were hooded and taken to the police station at 4, Lutheran Street, in Kherson where she could hear her husband being interrogated through a wall, she said. She and Andriy were later released.
After leaving Kherson, Lapchuk wrote to everyone she could think of to try and find her husband.
On June 9, she said she got a message from a pathologist who told her to call the next day. She knew immediately Vitaliy was dead.
His body had been found floating in a river, she said, showing photographs taken by a pathologist in which a birth mark on his shoulder could be seen.
Lapchuk said she paid for Vitaliy to be buried and has yet to see the grave.
She is convinced her husband was betrayed to the Russians by someone very close to them.
‘THE HOLE’
Ruslan, 52, who runs a beer store opposite the police station where Serdiuk was held, said that at the beginning of the occupation, Russian-made Ural trucks would pull up daily before the grey front door.
Detainees, he said, would be hurled from the back, their hands bound and heads covered by bags.
“This place was called ‘Yama’ (The Hole),” he said.
Serhii Polako, 48, a trader who lives across the street from the station, echoed Ruslan’s account.
He said that several weeks into the occupation, Russian national guard troops deployed at the site were replaced by men driving vehicles embossed with the letter “V”, and that was when the screams started.
“If there is a hell on earth, it was there,” he said.
About two weeks ago, he said, the Russians freed those being kept in the station in apparent preparation for their withdrawal.
“All of a sudden, they emptied the place, and we understood something was happening,” he told Reuters.
Serdiuk believes he was betrayed by an informant as the father of a Ukrainian serviceman.
He said Russian security personnel handcuffed him, put a bag over his head, forced him to bend at the waist and frog-marched him into a vehicle.
At the station, he was put in a cell so cramped that the occupants could not move while lying down. On some days, prisoners received only one meal.
The following day, he was hooded, his hands bound, and taken down to a cellar room. The interrogation and torture lasted about 90 minutes, he said.
His Russian interrogator knew all of his details and those of his family, and said that unless he cooperated, he would have his wife arrested and telephone his son so he could hear both of them screaming under torture, Serdiuk said.
Two days later, he was released without explanation. His wife found him outside the shop in which Bestanik works, virtually unable to walk.
Tom Balmforth reported from Krasne, Ukraine; Editing by Mike Collett-White and Philippa Fletcher
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
Police Refuse to Describe Horror Discovery of Missing California Woman Alexis Gabe
Investigators needed a forensic odontologist to identify missing 24-year-old Oakley resident Alexis Gabe, whose partial remains were discovered last week, police said in a press conference Monday. “Due to the fact that a forensic odontologist confirmed the partial remains via dental records, you can only imagine what we have recovered,” Detective Tyler Horn of the Oakley Police Department said. “Out of respect to the Gabe family, we do not want to get into specifics of what exact remains were recovered.” Gabe was reported missing Jan. 27 after she didn’t return home from her ex-boyfriend’s house. A visitor from Alaska made the find Nov. 3 while using a metal detector near the town of Plymouth, approximately 40 miles east of Sacramento. The remains were recovered Nov. 4, with police notifying the public Nov. 5. Other items of evidence were found at the scene, Horn said, including earrings, black garbage bag remnants, and duct tape. The earrings were determined to belong to Gabe based on photos of her wearing them. The condition of the remains “did not lead us to a specific manner of death, but we are confident her remains were separated from one another and scattered into similar areas,” Horn said. Gabe’s father, Gwyn, said at the press conference that “when Detective Horn called me asking for our dentist’s phone number, I knew something was up.” Police believe Gabe’s killer was her ex-boyfriend, Marshall Jones, who was killed in a June 1 shootout with federal officers attempting to serve him with an arrest warrant in Kent, Washington.
Read it at East County Today
CDC officials describe intense pressure, job threats from Trump White House
Several public health officials detailed a months-long campaign against Schuchat sparked by Trump appointees’ belief that her grim assessments of the pandemic reflected poorly on the president, leading Schuchat, a 32-year CDC veteran, to openly wonder if she would be fired in the summer of 2020, her colleagues told the panel.
The panel’s latest report also offers new insight into key flash points, such as a CDC-backed plan to require masks on public and commercial transportation in the summer of 2020, with Martin Cetron, director of the agency’s division of global migration and quarantine, citing evidence that the requirement would reduce covid risks to travelers.
The plan was backed by the travel industry and “could have made a significant contribution” by curbing infections and deaths ahead of a fall and winter virus surge that year, Cetron added, but Trump officials blocked the measure. President Biden later issued a similar order on his second day in office in January 2021.
Redfield and other officials told the panel that they believed they might be fired if they angered the White House, hindering the CDC’s ability to fight the virus.
“If we constantly are finger-pointing and blaming somebody else for things, we lose the fact that the real enemy here was the virus,” Cetron said in a May 2022 interview included in the report, adding that political infighting contributed to a subpar pandemic response. Cetron also criticized a federal order, Title 42, which used the pandemic as a public health reason to bar people from entering the United States at its borders with Canada and Mexico, as an example of a poorly constructed policy on which CDC experts were overruled.
The order was “handed to us,” Cetron told the panel, saying that then-White House adviser Stephen Miller was among the officials who discussed the immigration restrictions. Other emails and media reports have linked Miller to the order’s creation.
While Cetron said he and his team opposed the order, arguing that it lacked a scientific basis because the coronavirus was already widely spreading in the United States and could lead to harm for asylum seekers, Redfield signed Title 42 in March 2020. The Trump administration characterized the measure, which allows the government to immediately send asylum seekers back to their home countries, as a way to prevent the spread of infection inside detention cells, border stations and other crowded settings. Hundreds of thousands of migrants have since been turned away at the U.S.-Mexico border. The measure remains in place under the Biden administration, after a district court judge in May blocked the administration’s plan to lift the order.
The panel’s report draws on more than 2,100 pages of transcribed interviews with Redfield, Schuchat, Cetron and 10 other current and former CDC officials that were newly released Monday, in addition to prior interviews and testimony from people such as former White House coronavirus coordinator Deborah Birx. The panel also released other documents, including a letter sent by a pair of former Trump appointees, Kyle McGowan and Amanda Campbell, who served as the CDC’s chief of staff and deputy chief of staff, respectively, that detailed examples of political interference and poor treatment of CDC officials.
“The committee’s report reflects a serious and fair look at what happened,” McGowan said.
Rep. James E. Clyburn (D-S.C.), who chairs the panel, said that the report demonstrates how the Trump White House engaged in a concerted effort “to downplay the seriousness” of the pandemic.
“This prioritization of politics, contempt for science, and refusal to follow the advice of public health experts harmed the nation’s ability to respond effectively to the coronavirus crisis and put Americans at risk,” Clyburn said in a statement.
Clyburn’s panel has spent more than two years investigating the Trump administration’s pandemic response, issuing reports that detailed White House pressure on the Food and Drug Administration to authorize unproven coronavirus treatments, such as the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine, and its efforts to overrule public health officials on coronavirus guidance for churches; and exploring how its focus on challenging the 2020 election outcome distracted from the virus response, among other findings.
Republicans have assailed the panel’s reports as partisan, saying they have failed to probe the Biden administration’s virus missteps or the origins of the pandemic. GOP leaders vow to conduct their own investigations next year should they win back the House or the Senate. CDC Director Rochelle Walensky acknowledged this summer that her agency had made significant mistakes during the pandemic, laying out a plan intended to speed up its recommendations, improve its communications and take other steps to win back public trust.
The report also details how Trump appointees at the Department of Health and Human Services worked to wrest control of the agency’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports (MMWRs), which offer public updates on scientists’ findings and had been considered off-limits to political appointees for decades.
McGowan and Campbell told the panel that fellow Trump appointees were angry about a May 2020 MMWR written by Schuchat that they believed did not give them sufficient credit for their efforts to contain the pandemic.
“Secretary [Alex] Azar, in particular, was upset and said that if the CDC would not get in line, then HHS would take control of approving the publication,” McGowan and Campbell’s lawyer wrote to the panel. As a result, Trump appointees increasingly received access to the CDC’s draft summaries and sought to edit or block the reports, including one on the rise in hydroxychloroquine prescriptions that was held up for more than two months amid concerns that it would call attention to an unproven treatment touted by Trump.
In a statement, Azar said that he “never pressured Dr. Redfield to modify the content of a single MMWR scientific article.”
“I always regarded the MMWR and other peer-reviewed scientific publications as sacrosanct,” Azar added, saying that he worked with Redfield to “protect the integrity” of the report’s peer-review process after a “defect” was identified in May 2020. Azar did not specify the “defect” that needed to be addressed.
The panel concluded that Trump appointees had sought to “alter the contents, rebut, or delay the release” of 18 MMWRs and one health alert on an inflammation syndrome in children who had previously tested positive for covid, and succeeded at least five times.
CDC officials said the agency resisted the most significant efforts to edit their publications. “Was I concerned that there was an attempt to alter the scientific content of the MMWR? Yes. Do I think they were successful? No,” Jay Butler, the CDC’s deputy director of infectious diseases, told the panel in a November 2021 interview.
The panel also details repeated attempts by Trump appointees to pressure Schuchat, such as a personal phone call from then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows — the first time any White House chief of staff had called the CDC deputy, she said — that left her “very shaken,” she told the panel, declining to offer details of the call on the advice of HHS counsel.
Meadows did not immediately reply to an email sent to a spokesperson.
Schuchat was again targeted after an interview she gave to a medical journal in June 2020, in which she acknowledged the nation’s struggles in containing the virus. HHS spokesman Michael Caputo and his adviser Paul Alexander circulated internal emails claiming that the CDC deputy was attempting “to damage the President.”
Other officials described interactions with Caputo and Alexander in which the two men “threatened” staff, such as when a CDC official spoke to NPR without the HHS spokesman’s permission in July 2020, the panel said. Caputo “wanted to terminate the CDC official who set up the interview,” McGowan and Campbell’s lawyer wrote to the panel.
Caputo declined a request for comment. Alexander did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Redfield said he repeatedly told Caputo that Alexander should stop his barrage of emails to staffers demanding changes to CDC publications and accusing them of working to undermine Trump. “I advocated to Caputo, probably around [late June], that he should get rid of this guy. He’s not helpful,” Redfield told the panel.
But Alexander’s messages continued until mid-September 2020, when his emails leaked to the press and Caputo subsequently accused CDC scientists of sedition in a Facebook Live video. Caputo took a medical leave on Sept. 16, and Alexander left the agency the same day.
Redfield also said he clashed with the White House and Florida politicians about his plan to reissue a “no-sail order” that would keep the nation’s cruise ships in dock, given evidence that the coronavirus could rapidly spread aboard the vessels and sicken and potentially kill vulnerable passengers.
“I was signing it … [even] if that meant that I was resigning or being fired as CDC director,” Redfield told the panel. He said he was eventually able to reach a compromise in October 2020 that kept the ships in dock until the cruise industry instituted more safety precautions.