In an open letter published Friday in the Epidemiology Monitor, 1044 current and former officers of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) condemned the government’s politicization and silencing of their own agency in its response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The 1044 signatories of the letter comprised over 25% of all current and former officials in the EIS, the CDC’s elite two-year disease-fighting program, since the program’s founding in 1951, and included former CDC directors Jeffrey Kaplan (director under Clinton and Bush administrations) and Tom Frieden (director under Obama administration). According to Charles Rabkin, a medical epidemiologist at the National Cancer Institute and member of the 1984 EIS Class who spent months collecting signatures from all EIS classes, the letter was meant as “an expression of solidarity among our community.

“The absence of national leadership on COVID-19 is unprecedented and dangerous,” the letter stated in response to the nation’s fragmented handling of the pandemic. As per a plan the Trump administration revealed in late April, the tasks of implementing, testing, and developing strategies to combat COVID-19 were delegated to governors and local officials, leading to a divided and less effective response to the pandemic. For one, no official nationwide contract tracing system was established, making cases difficult to track across state borders.

Additionally, all signatories of the letter also wrote to “express [their] concern about the ominous politicization and silencing of the nation’s health protection agency during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic,” which has become increasingly evident with the Trump administration’s handling of the virus. Over the course of the pandemic, the president has become infamous for not abiding by many of the guidelines set forth by the CDC, actually contracting the virus himself earlier this month.

His administration’s efforts to sideline medical professionals and experts has also caused belief in the CDC and medical professionals in general to become a partisan issue. The CDC, long seen as the world’s front-runner public health agency, has always been a crucial component of the U.S. government’s response to past pandemics, including during outbreaks of SARS, Ebola, and H1N1. However, their role in the current crisis has been critically undermined by the White House. Not only has the CDC been routinely denied by White House officials to hold any press briefings for over the course of this pandemic—a stark contrast to the 13 meetings they held in a single month in the government’s response to the Ebola outbreak—but the White House has also been found guilty of trying to directly influence CDC reporting. 

For example, White House advisors, including the spokesman of the Human and Health Services Department with no medical or scientific experience, Michael Caputo, and his scientific advisor Paul Alexander have accused the CDC of “writing hit pieces on the administration” and being “very misleading,” and have demanded access to fully review all CDC reports before they’re published, a far cry from the years-old CDC practice of making most edits internally and giving the White House a brief synopsis before publication. Some changes they’ve made include trying to retroactively tailor reports about the risks of COVID-19 and altering certain language written by CDC scientists on social distancing and guidelines for houses of worship. 

Although they’ve been criticized for injecting bias and partisanship into a non-partisan health agency, Caputo has defended the administration and his team’s actions as making sure that “evidence, science-based data drives policy through this pandemic—not ulterior deep state motives in the bowels of CDC.”

Outrage over media coverage of emails and documents obtained by The Associated Press detailing the White House’s interference of the CDC’s affairs also caused the administration to send in so-called “politicals” to keep an eye on the agency’s staff.

“It is an unprecedented sidelining of the CDC,” Frieden remarked. “They’re being micromanaged.”

The current director of the CDC, Dr. Robert Redfield, has been particularly targeted by the administration. Over the past few months, Dr. Redfield has been on the receiving end of multiple furious calls from the likes of President Trump, Caputo, and Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar about pandemic guidance, and has been pressured to classify houses of worship as “essential” and make changes to the languages of certain CDC reports. Former aide to Vice President Mike Pence Olivia Troye has asserted that, despite the pressure from the White House, Redfeld is still “protecting his workforce but also trying to hang in there.”

Dr. Redfield has also confided in associates his concern that the White House’s interference was affecting the morale of the CDC and its reputation.

With no end in sight for the coronavirus pandemic in the U.S., it’s more important than ever that the U.S. government directs its efforts towards the most effective and efficient methods of combating the virus and makes full use of all available resources, especially the knowledge and insight of experts and medical professionals such as those of the CDC.

“CDC should be at the forefront of a successful response to this global public health emergency,” the letter concludes. “We urgently call upon the American people to demand and our nation’s leaders to allow CDC to resume its indispensable role.”

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