ProPublica obtained hundreds of emails and other internal government documents and interviewed more than 30 CDC employees, contractors and Trump administration officials who witnessed or were involved in key moments of the crisis. How could an agency that eradicated smallpox globally and wiped out polio in the United States have fallen so far? A vaunted agency that was once the global gold standard of public health has, with breathtaking speed, become a target of anger, scorn and even pity. With more than 216,000 people dead this year, most Americans know the low points of the current chapter already. When the next history of the CDC is written, 2020 will emerge as perhaps the darkest chapter in its 74 years, rivaled only by its involvement in the infamous Tuskegee experiment, in which federal doctors withheld medicine from poor Black men with syphilis, then tracked their descent into blindness, insanity and death.
“I am very troubled on this Sunday morning that there will be people who will get sick and perhaps die because of what we were forced to do,” he wrote.
The danger of singing wasn’t mentioned.Įarly that Sunday morning, as Americans across the country prepared excitedly to return to houses of worship, Butler, a churchgoer himself, poured his anguish and anger into an email to a few colleagues. The CDC’s failure to use them was insubordinate, according to emails at the time.įifteen minutes later, one of Butler’s deputies had the agency’s text replaced with the White House version, the emails show. The next day, a furious call came from the office of the vice president: The White House suggestions were not optional. “Why is it not up?” they demanded until it was posted on the CDC website that afternoon. On Friday, Trump’s aides called the CDC repeatedly about the guidance, according to emails. In reviewing a raft of last-minute edits from the White House, Butler’s team rejected those that conflicted with CDC research, including a worrisome suggestion to delete a line that urged congregations to “consider suspending or at least decreasing” the use of choirs. That Thursday, Trump had announced that the CDC would release safety guidelines for them “very soon.” He accused Democratic governors of disrespecting churches, and deemed houses of worship “essential services.”īutler’s team rushed to finalize the guidance for churches, synagogues and mosques that Trump’s aides had shelved in April after battling the CDC over the language. Trained as one of the CDC’s elite disease detectives, he’d helped the FBI investigate the anthrax attacks, and he’d led the distribution of vaccines during the H1N1 flu pandemic when demand far outstripped supply.īut days earlier, Butler and his team had suddenly found themselves on President Donald Trump’s front burner when the president began publicly agitating for churches to reopen. Two died.īutler, an infectious disease specialist with more than three decades of experience, seemed the ideal person to lead the effort. The agency’s scientific journal recently had detailed a superspreader event in which 52 of the 61 singers at a 2½-hour choir practice developed COVID-19. The week before, the CDC had published its investigation of an outbreak at an Arkansas church that had resulted in four deaths. Email address This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
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