WH Steals CDC Data

Late in the evening Tuesday, July 14th, healthcare administration was surprised to find out that the hospital data on coronavirus patients will now be sent directly to the Trump administration instead of being first sent to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) by Wednesday, July 15th. This is an appalling move that leaves many questioning the motives behind such a move. Why did the Trump administration decide to cut ties with the World Health Organization, now the CDC, and continuously attempt to discredit everything Dr. Fauci has said about the pandemic?

With reporting standards now changed, the database of information will no longer be available to the general public. The New York Times states the "database that will receive new information is not open to the public, which could affect the work of scores of researchers, modelers and health officials who rely on CDC data to make projections and crucial decisions,” and this decision makes managing the pandemic more difficult than ever. This change threatens the work that many experts have done so far to counteract the devastating effects of the pandemic. The database of information is used to properly plan personal protective equipment, staff, beds needed, ICU needs, and so much more. The data helps show upticks in coronavirus cases that allow hospitals to plan effectively weeks in advance. These actions go against everything that is right and healthy for the American public.

Making the data less available to the public also makes it nearly impossible for parents and school systems to make healthy decisions for everyone involved. The data is very much needed so that schools can run safely and shutdown ahead of time if needed. Not giving the school systems the information that they need increases everyone's risk. How can our president expect us to send our children back to school when we are well aware that the risks to our health are greater now than ever before. It was first believed that children did not get sick and were not carriers of this virus but that has since been proven to be false. Kids do carry the virus onto their parents, which risks the lives of all of those parents who are actually doing their best to get back to work.

This decision is just one of a long line of decisions that prove that this president doesn't actually care about American lives. This is a president who cannot see the needs of the people and his myopic view of how the world should run is nothing less than harmful to Americans. Other countries have managed to protect their people while the president who boasts that the United States is the greatest is making decisions that plummet us into not much better than a third world country. Americans have lost their freedom to travel to other countries, which is another obvious way that Americans are being told that their president has completely mismanaged every aspect of this pandemic.

This will all get worse in the winter months when people do not know if they are suffering from flu symptoms or coronavirus symptoms. If just one parents contracts the virus and sends their child to school, the this will cause an increase in cases and deaths all around. Because of HIPAA laws, teachers won't know which students or families have had the virus and because of the changes made that bypass the CDC, we are all in great danger.

We must not allow this president to blind us. I pray that hospitals find a way to report their data and inform the public properly before the White House has the ability to completely change the story that the data tells. We are all at risk of being blinded and lied to even more by the Trump administration in ways that threaten the lives of millions of Americans. We have listened to Trump for far too long now. He is not a health expert and should not be listened to when it comes to public health decisions. The Trump administration needs to pay attention to the science of virology before they make any more decisions that harm the American people.