Former CDC chiefs rebuke Trump for 'undermining' agency's guidelines
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/07/14/former-cdc-chiefs-trump-agency-guidelines-360527
Four former heads of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Tuesday implicitly rebuked President Donald Trump, arguing the extraordinary efforts by him and other administration officials to diminish the public health agencys guidance were contributing to a resurgence of coronavirus cases across the United States.
In an op-ed published in The Washington Post, former CDC Directors Tom Frieden, Jeffrey Koplan and David Satcher, as well as former acting CDC Director Richard Besser, fiercely criticized political leaders and others attempting to undermine the agency as it works to issue recommendations for schools seeking to reopen their doors for the fall semester.
As the debate last week around reopening schools more safely showed, these repeated efforts to subvert sound public health guidelines introduce chaos and uncertainty while unnecessarily putting lives at risk, the op-eds authors wrote, adding that while
t is not unusual for CDC guidelines to be changed or amended during a multi-agency clearance process, it is extraordinary for guidelines to be undermined after their release.
The condemnation from the former CDC chiefs comes after the president last Wednesday disavowed the agencys school reopening guidelines as very tough & expensive, and threatened to slash federal funding to schools that do not physically reopen.
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