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29 April 20
RSN: Bill Simpich | CDC Is Under Gag Order - Americans Can Speak Loud and Clear
Bill Simpich, Reader Supported News
Simpich writes: "I have spent a month trying to find a public health figure in Washington DC who stood up and took effective action to warn the people of the United States about Covid-19 in January or February of this year. I can't find anybody. Can you?"
Bill Simpich, Reader Supported News
Simpich writes: "I have spent a month trying to find a public health figure in Washington DC who stood up and took effective action to warn the people of the United States about Covid-19 in January or February of this year. I can't find anybody. Can you?"
’ve had it. I give up.
Write me. I’ll publish it. If it pans out.
At this point, we need a full-throttle political campaign to stop a second outbreak. Why didn’t it happen the first time?
I heard that Nancy Messonnier spoke out early – she is the CDC’s chief on immunization and respiratory diseases. That would make sense – her agency’s name, after all, is the Centers for Disease and Control and Prevention.
She did stand up at a White House press conference on February 25 and announce that community spread was going to happen. “Disruption to everyday life may be severe … It's not so much a question of if this will happen anymore, but rather more a question of exactly when ...”
CDC director Anne Schuchat backed her up, agreeing that it was “not if, but when.” However, Schuchat also maintained the crumbling company line: “Efforts at containment so far have worked.”
On February 26, Trump named Mike Pence to lead the coronavirus response. The leadership was now taken away from the health officials.
The Washington Post reported that the Trumpers had forced Messonnier to shut up, describing her blunt talk as “just too early.”
She said the unsayable. But it was just a peep. She didn’t say it loud and clear.
By February 28, she was back at the White House saying misleading things like:
“This brings the number of person-to-person spread in the United States to 3 (note: the total US cases were 15 at that point, not counting the trapped American passengers on the cruise ship Diamond Princess – Trump kept them from landing in San Francisco to exclude them from the total case count!) … Because there have been such a small number of cases in the United States, CDC has been able to supplement the activities of the state and local health departments, to be very aggressive in our contact tracing, that is true from the first case and it remains true now.”
Very aggressive? Not likely. We were in the middle of a forest fire of unreported cases – and everyone suspected it. The CDC and FDA had spent February floundering in rolling out an effective testing regimen, even after the announcement a public health emergency on January 31 – the first quarantine order in fifty years. You can’t contact-trace if you haven’t tested.
As late as February 13, the CDC was sending out an “URGENT” appeal for assistance as it tried to locate missing paperwork of individuals suspected of being infected. By the time the job postings were listed for investigators who might be able to track down these lost documents, 15 cases were confirmed – it was now February 28.
On March 3, after 60 cases had been announced, Messonnier said: “We will continue to maintain as long as practical an aggressive national posture of containment.” “Posture of containment” is the operational phrase.
By March 10, The New York Times revealed how badly the CDC and FDA had botched the testing regimen. CDC chief Robert Redfield protested the genie could be put back in the bottle, but it was too late. You can’t contain the virus without contact tracing. You can’t contact-trace without testing.
By mid-March, the entire country was in the process of lockdown. At that point, Messonnier, Schuchat, and other CDC top brass were barred from Trump’s soon-to-be daily briefings. CDC chief Robert Redfield’s reputation is that he is an ineffective public speaker. The administration chose Anthony Fauci – the infectious disease chief at NIH – to lead the communication efforts of the coronavirus team. Deborah Birx was picked as the coronavirus coordinator who answered to Pence, who answered to Trump.
Were these public officials in Washington DC willing to stand up at the beginning of the crisis and risk their paycheck?
How about Tony Fauci, seen as the nation’s top expert? Nope. Look, I like Fauci. Famed playwright (best known for The Normal Heart) and ACT UP activist Larry Kramer called him out for years during the AIDS crisis – and yet Fauci sought him out repeatedly for advice. Fauci told The New Yorker, “In American medicine, there are two eras. Before Larry – and after Larry.”
At five foot seven, Fauci was the captain of the Regis High School basketball team in the upper East Side. He knows the importance of positioning oneself. Fauci is a political operative – like all top health officials since 9/11 and the anthrax crisis.
Fauci is a skilled communicator. He knows how to choose his words carefully, and how not to offend the man he calls “the boss.” That ability got him on the coronavirus task force. That ability is also our problem.
Here’s Fauci on January 24: “We don't want the American public to be worried about this because their risk is low.”
January 28? Fauci: “Even if there’s a rare asymptomatic person that might transmit, an epidemic is not driven by asymptomatic carriers.” Yet the evidence shows that it wasn't just sick people who spread this virus.
February 17? Fauci said the danger to Americans was “just miniscule.” He added that in the USA …”there was absolutely no reason whatsoever to wear a mask.”
February 25? “You need to do nothing different than you are already doing … (if an outbreak occurs) these are the kinds of things you want to think of.” Hardly a call to arms.
Deborah Brix, the coronavirus response coordinator under Trump? She is a medical doctor who has patented many vaccines – an important skill set – but her speciality is not in the spread of epidemics. She is from the State Department and focuses on global health diplomacy.
On March 19, the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University sent a Freedom of Information Act request to the CDC. The question was very simple: What are the policies on employees’ ability to speak with the press and the public?
The CDC said it would take six months to answer that question.
The Knight Institute sued the CDC, highlighting that as early as 2017 Axios Magazine had reported an 8/31/17 email from CDC public affairs officer Jeffrey Lancashire to the National Center for Health Statistics. Lancashire stated that CDC policy for all CDC staff was that “any and all correspondence with any member of the news media, regardless of the nature of the inquiry, must be cleared through CDC’s Atlanta Communications Office.”
Messonnier was part of this decision-making process, as seen in this 9/13/17 memo she received: “... there would be no written version of this sent from OADC (Office of the Associate Director for Communication) ... for ALL (reactive) media requests ... send up every request to your CDC press officer...
This policy is outrageous. Similar gag orders were imposed on other governmental agencies the week that Trump came into office. It is only the secondary problem.
The main problem is the cowardice of the people in charge and the media’s failure to report on these gag orders. Why aren’t government officials willing to risk their jobs in the face of the coronavirus pandemic? Why isn’t the media following these outrages after initial reporting? Don’t good reporters care about how they are being spoon-fed? Have we forgotten the operating principle “garbage in – garbage out”?
On the people in charge – Trump and Pence are beneath contempt. Trump is simply an idiot. Pence effectively infected hundreds of Indiana citizens a few years ago by repeatedly refusing to decriminalize needle exchange in the middle of his state's HIV crisis – until his career was at stake. Then he went home and “prayed on it.” The damage was already done.
I know what it takes to flatten the curve. In the late eighties, I organized the San Francisco needle exchange with thirteen health researchers and political activists. We called ourselves Prevention Point. (Two Prevention Point members – Jennifer Lorvick and Alex Kral – helped me research this article.) We knew it was the only way to stop the spiraling spread of HIV infections among the injection drug-using population. We were ready to go to jail – we were quickly joined by researchers and activists in other cities – and some of us were arrested.
You know what we found out? The director of public health, the police chief, and the mayor were all behind us. They weren’t about to go public. But they helped reduce the heat. No small thing in the middle of the AIDS epidemic. But not enough.
You would think that it ultimately would be a great way to advance one’s career. It certainly helped my legal career. I was able to argue the necessity defense to four different juries – virtually no attorney had been able to use it even once. We got great headlines. Nobody got convicted.
Our main expert in the needle exchange trials was Peter Lurie, who convinced judges and juries alike that AIDS was an imminent threat to American lives unless we took action with needle exchange immediately. (When Trump appointed Redfield as CDC chief in 2018, Lurie blasted him in a Center for Science in the Public Interest press release as a “sloppy scientist” who quarantined HIV-positive soldiers in the military.)
At the final trial, we chose a homicide cop to be on the jury. He became the foreman. Everyone was acquitted. The district attorney gave up.
We saved a lot of lives. But not enough. We didn’t have the biggest megaphone of all – public office. For years, the public officials remained silent.
Let’s turn to now. Where do we stand?
Citizens are finally wearing masks – several weeks after the outbreak began. Even as late as March 31, Fauci was saying that although masks for citizens were under “very serious consideration,” he added “we’re not there yet.”
What about testing and contact tracing – the basic tools for containing a second outbreak? The CDC has been promising expanded testing for three months. Experts say we need to expand our testing and contact tracing by an order of magnitude before any serious reopening of the economy.
The Rockefeller Foundation’s opinion is that it will take two months to gear up from one million tests a week to three million tests a week, and six months to get to 30 million tests a week. There’s a Harvard Plan that believes the economy could be fully reopened by August 1 if we could test between 35-140 million a week – but I don’t know anyone who likes the idea of contact tracing by monitoring cellphone calls.
In March, Trump turned away from the Defense Production Act, finally giving in last week for at least the production of swabs. We are at least two months away from having the ability to test and contact-trace sufficiently to avoid a second outbreak. We don’t have the swabs, the PPE, the testing centers, the labs, or the personnel.
Georgia and other areas are opening restaurants this week. Droplets spread twelve feet. That requires a lot of social distancing. Cloth or paper masks will not protect the waiters and waitresses – and the patrons can’t wear masks while they eat. I don’t see anyone jumping up and down. This is basic science.
This virus turned into a worldwide epidemic – why aren’t we listening to the virologists and the epidemiologists? Trevor Bedford, a Seattle epidemiologist, was sending his data about this pandemic in late January to everyone in the health community who would listen.
Bedford now has 225,000 Twitter followers and a growing public presence. He may be the best detective out there – take a look at his data set. On contract tracers and testing, Bedford makes it plain: “We need an army.”
During the civil rights era, the people who mattered sat inside restaurants and opened them up. Now we need people in front of these restaurants to shut them down. We need you now – ideally with doctors and scientists on the front line – but don’t wait for them.
We don’t want a second outbreak. The USA has 4% of the world’s population and one-third of the world’s cases. Haven’t we made enough mistakes already?
We can’t count on the scientists. We can’t count on the doctors. This is no time to sit around and mope. We have to galvanize the media. We have to depend on scientific information and each other if we are going to effectively stop this pandemic. We need effective political organizing – on every level.
Bill Simpich is an Oakland attorney who knows that it doesn’t have to be like this. He was part of the legal team chosen by Public Justice as Trial Lawyer of the Year in 2003 for winning a jury verdict of 4.4 million in Judi Bari’s lawsuit against the FBI and the Oakland police.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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