JUST IN: White House Reportedly Pressured CDC to Downplay Risks of Reopening Schools to Align With Trump’s Re-Election Agenda

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According to a report by the New York Times, multiple White House staffers spent this summer pressuring the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to relax its recommendations about restarting schools in the fall and succeeded in getting several key documents and communications edited, because President Donald Trump wanted schools reopened before the election.

The staffers reportedly involved include Dr. Deborah Birx and Mark Short, Vice President Mike Pence‘s chief of staff. A key source for the Times article was Olivia Troye, a former Pence staffer and lifelong Republican who resigned last month and, since then, has come out in support of Joe Biden and vocally criticized the White House in interviews this month.

The battle within the CDC began in July, when the agency began drafting recommendations for parents to review regarding the options for sending their children back to school in the fall.

As the 2020 election loomed closer, Trump was openly calling for schools to “open quickly, beautifully, in the fall.” Meanwhile, the CDC was producing a “decision-making tool” that encouraged families to “consider the full spectrum of risks involved in both in-person and virtual learning options.”

Earlier drafts of this document, reviewed by the Times, noted that scientists were still learning about the coronavirus and while the limited data did seem to indicate children were less likely to contract the virus, they also warned there were still risks of ongoing severe illnesses, not to mention the risks posed to more vulnerable household members, like elderly or immunocompromised relatives.

Trump bristled at the pessimistic warnings, and White House staffers began creating documents and charts focusing on, instead, the risks of keeping schools closed, such as students suffering from depression or anxiety, while continuing to frame children at a lower risk of contracting the virus:

Several former officials said that before one task force briefing in late June, White House officials, including Ms. Troye, spoke to top C.D.C. officers asking for data that could show the low risk of infection and death for school-age children — “a snazzy, easy-to-read document,” one former senior public health official recalled.

The White House seized on a bar chart the C.D.C. distributed that week to other agencies, which showed that 60 percent of coronavirus deaths were people over the age of 75. Officials asked the C.D.C. to provide a new chart to show people 18 and under as a separate group — rather than including them as normal in an under-25 category — in an effort to demonstrate that the risk for school-age children was relatively low.

At least some of the White House’s efforts were successful, according to both the interviews the Times conducted with Troye and other staffers, and from reviewing earlier draft documents showing changes made in the final versions.

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