Sep 15 2020

The Corruption of the CDC

When and if former Vice President Joe Biden is elected president in November come January 20 he has a lot of work to do to undo the disaster left in the corruption of Donald Trump and his criminal minions. On of the biggest messes is the Center for Disease Control which has been taken over by unqualified buddies of Trump rendering it untrustworthy. On Friday, Politico reported that Health and Human Services interfered with the CDC reports in its <emMorbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports. Those are the reports that physicians, scientists and the public rely on for information on how Covid-19 is spreading and who is at risk. These reports have been relied as the best information on diseases and treatment, not just in the US but world wide, for decades. Those reports have now been put in doubt by HHS to fit Trump’s criminal agenda.

The health department’s politically appointed communications aides have demanded the right to review and seek changes to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s weekly scientific reports charting the progress of the coronavirus pandemic, in what officials characterized as an attempt to intimidate the reports’ authors and water down their communications to health professionals.

In some cases, emails from communications aides to CDC Director Robert Redfield and other senior officials openly complained that the agency’s reports would undermine President Donald Trump’s optimistic messages about the outbreak, according to emails reviewed by POLITICO and three people familiar with the situation.

CDC officials have fought back against the most sweeping changes, but have increasingly agreed to allow the political officials to review the reports and, in a few cases, compromised on the wording, according to three people familiar with the exchanges. The communications aides’ efforts to change the language in the CDC’s reports have been constant across the summer and continued as recently as Friday afternoon. [..]

But since Michael Caputo, a former Trump campaign official with no medical or scientific background, was installed in April as the Health and Human Services department’s new spokesperson, there have been substantial efforts to align the reports with Trump’s statements, including the president’s claims that fears about the outbreak are overstated, or stop the reports altogether.

Caputo and his team have attempted to add caveats to the CDC’s findings, including an effort to retroactively change agency reports that they said wrongly inflated the risks of Covid-19 and should have made clear that Americans sickened by the virus may have been infected because of their own behavior, according to the individuals familiar with the situation and emails reviewed by POLITICO.

Who the hell is Michael Caputo? According to his Wiki page, Caputo is a Republican strategist with long ties to New York politics, Donald Trump and his felonious dirty trickster Roger Stone. But their is much more, as Mary Papenfuss at Huffinton Post reveals in her article on Caputo’s ties the Russia. Yes, Russia.

The Health and Human Services official who has been pressuring the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to change COVID-19 reports to reflect well on President Donald Trump has troubling Kremlin ties stretching for years.  [..]

Caputo, a former top official of the Trump campaign who has no medical or scientific background, has claimed his actions are a defense against the imagined “deep state” out to get Trump. But reports of his CDC scheme have renewed fears about his history with Russia, which interfered in the 2016 election to help Trump.

Caputo, who lived in Russia for six years, was an adviser to Boris Yeltsin from 1995 to 1999 and helped him get elected as president. He also served as an adviser to a subsidiary of the state-owned energy company Gazprom, and reportedly helped shore up Russian President Vladimir Putin’s reputation.

Caputo’s Kremlin ties were so concerning that he became a target of former special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election. He was questioned but was not charged with any offenses. He also testified before the House Intelligence Committee that he had no contact with Russians while serving on the Trump campaign.

Caputo has attempted to scrub his links to Russia in his Wikipedia bio — and insisted in an interview that his work doesn’t make him a “Putin stooge.” He told his hometown newspaper, The Buffalo News, that “at the time, Putin wasn’t such a bad guy.” [..]

Caputo admitted to Politico he has attempted to change CDC reports.

He told the Buffalo News that amid the “good” work the CDC does are “sometimes stories which seem to purposefully mislead and undermine the president’s COVID response with what [other] scientists label as poor scholarship.”

After his late night rant on Sunday, Caputo has now completely deleted his twitter account. Twiter is, like everything on the internet, forever.

President Biden will have his work cut out for him. Vote the Trump Crime Regime out on November 3rd.

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