The New York Times recently reported about a horrific situation at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention when Covid-19 first appeared. No, it wasn’t about whether a bat or a pangolin or an experiment gone wrong had set off an epidemic. It was far worse.
In the midst of an extremely dangerous worldwide pandemic, young scientists were being censored, threatened, and bullied by the CDC’s leadership and others holding high political office in the Trump administration, the paper reported. They were told to stop sharing their frank opinions on social media about what was going on as a lethal strain of Covid began to spread around the world.
Incredibly, instead of indignation at the censorship of our scientists, this nation is consumed by an irresolvable, politically driven dispute over the origins of Covid—lab leak or zoonotic spillover? That debate is all but pointless. The requisite evidence is not available, and the answer to the question is more or less irrelevant. Both origin scenarios are plausible and thus require worldwide policy attention.
“Early on during Covid… politics crushed the voice of the CDC.”
What should be commanding this nation’s attention, eliciting congressional hearings, independent investigations by high level commissions, and sustained outrage on the part of every American is the utter failure of the CDC to respond rapidly, truthfully, and transparently to a global infectious disease outbreak that ultimately killed nearly seven million people worldwide, including over a million in the U.S. No one can argue we are in any way prepared for future outbreaks without fully understanding what happened early on during Covid when politics crushed the voice of the CDC. We need to know to ensure it cannot happen again.
The Times’s reporting focuses on the agonizing experience of a group of young scientists who worked for the CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Services. The scientists were heartbroken, the Times reports, to realize that the CDC had effectively acknowledged to its own staff that it had evidence that the new coronavirus was being spread by people without symptoms. But it had not told the public. At one point, the scientists basically snuck away from their desks under fear of reprisals to discuss what was going on. “All of us knew tens of thousands were going to die, and we were helpless to stop it,” said Dr. Daniel Wozniczka, one of the scientists, according to the Times.
Why couldn’t those scientists warn the public? The CDC was under intense pressure from the country’s political leaders not to tell the truth. Trump administration officials were not allowing the world’s leading public health authority to say what it believed.
“The political throttling of the CDC played out in plain sight.”
The details of what happened behind the scenes at the Epidemic Intelligence Service are new, but the political throttling of the CDC played out in plain sight at the time. In February 2020, Nancy Messonnier, a senior CDC official, warned that the virus was likely to spread and to severely disrupt daily life. The stock market plunged, and she abruptly disappeared from public view. Vice President Mike Pence was placed in charge of the government’s Covid response.
Isn’t this demonstrable decision to politicize, censor, and ultimately conceal the dangers of Covid as unacceptable as anything the Chinese government may have done to obscure its origins and silence whistleblowers?
Don’t we need legislation to immunize the CDC and other health agencies against political interference? Should whistle-blower protections be strengthened so concerned younger and vulnerable experts can speak freely? Doesn’t the media need to recommit to give stronger voice to dissenters and the censored when they try to sound an alarm during a plague? And shouldn’t professional societies and journals find safe forums to help those who feel the weight of political meddling get their voices heard even if anonymously?
“It hardly matters what the origins of Covid were and how it spread if our own scientists and public health officials were not permitted by our government to talk freely.”
Many in Congress prefer to bemoan censorship in China. But we continue to let our politicians call the shots and set the boundaries of fact about public health crises. No meaningful reforms have been instituted to protect against future infectious disease tragedies where Americans die in droves unnecessarily. The focus in Congress in many state legislatures and many scientific forums is solely on what China knew and when did that country know it.
The primary focus of American inquiries ought to be when did American scientists believe they knew important information about Covid, who prevented them from sharing their opinions, and how do we ensure that form of censorship never happens again? It hardly matters what the origins of Covid were and how it spread if our own scientists and public health officials were not permitted by our government to talk freely.
Arthur L. Caplan is the Drs. William F. and Virginia Connolly Mitty professor of bioethics and the founding head of New York University School of Medicine’s Division of Medical Ethics.
This post was originally published on Market Watch
