In the transcripts, other CDC officials described how requests to hold briefings about mask guidance and pediatric Covid-19 cases and deaths were denied. When asked about a CNN report that CDC officials felt “muzzled,” Dr. Anne Schuchat, CDC’s former principal deputy director, said, “That is the feeling that we had, many of us had.”
It took “great effort to protect that integrity,” Schuchat said in the transcribed excerpt, and “active effort” on the part of CDC officials “to make sure that the attempts were not successful” to alter the reports.
In another interview, Dr. Christine Casey, an editor of CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, described an email from Trump appointee and former US Health and Human Services adviser Paul Alexander that she saw as a request to stop a report. She called it “highly unusual and quite concerning for somebody to ask to put an immediate stop on MMWR reports. I don’t think in my memory that has ever happened. And, to be accused — because it is accusatory language — that MMWR content is designed to harm our commander in chief, the President.”
Casey said she was instructed to delete the email and was told the direction came from Redfield.
“This document resulted in less testing and less — less aggressive testing of those without symptoms that I believed were the primary reason for the early community spread,” she said.
The committee also renewed its request for Redfield to appear before the committee for a transcribed interview, and requested interviews with three additional senior officials: Dr. Martin Cetron, the director of CDC’s Division of Global Migration and Quarantine; Dr. Daniel Jernigan, CDC’s deputy director for public health science and surveillance; and Dr. Henry Walke, the director of the Division of Preparedness and Emerging Infections in CDC’s National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases and former incident manager of CDC’s Covid-19 response.