After the president made several announcements that “the reason we have more cases of coronavirus (he used a more racial term) is because we do too much testing,” the CDC suddenly changed their testing recommendations on Aug. 24. The new regulations aligned with the president’s views that school children should go back to the classrooms and that less testing is needed.
As it turns out, the doctors and scientists at the CDC never approved that change, but it was placed there by a White House political appointee to correspond with the president’s thinking.
The Center for Disease Control and Prevention is responsible for protecting the lives of millions of Americans. Their recommendations are taken seriously by physicians throughout the country and in much of the free world. Posting false recommendations on the CDC website potentially causes sickness and death for thousands of Americans and millions of people around the world.
We have no idea how much harm was done as the result of this blatantly partisan and political act, but the aftershocks are still happening. Now, thousands of doctors across the country and millions of Americans have serious doubts about whether they can trust the CDC’s recommendations.
Now the president says he’s going to override the FDA’s process of deciding when and whether or not a vaccine against the coronavirus is safe. This has the potential to harm and kill even more Americans.
When politics are injected into the serious work of science, everyone loses. While politics may support some petty, short-term emotion, science is the truth that will prevail over time. We need lawmakers from both parties to speak out against partisan politics overriding science, especially science concerning our health.
In 1633, the Catholic Church (the most powerful political entity at the time) condemned Galileo as a heretic for reporting his observations of moons revolving around the planet Jupiter (and not the Earth). Haven’t we learned our lesson since then?
(Dr. James Fieseher lives in Dover.)