The same administration that scrubbed climate-change data off of government servers has ordered hospitals to stop sending Covid-19 data to the Centers for Disease Control.
The Trump administration has ordered hospitals to bypass the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and send all Covid-19 patient information to a central database in Washington beginning on Wednesday. The move has alarmed health experts who fear the data will be politicized or withheld from the public.
The new instructions were posted recently in a little-noticed document on the Department of Health and Human Services website. From now on, the department — not the C.D.C. — will collect daily reports about the patients that each hospital is treating, the number of available beds and ventilators, and other information vital to tracking the pandemic.
In view of the Trump administration’s indifference to facts and tendency toward glib denial of reality, it’s difficult to imagine that this serves any purpose but controlling the narrative; the government that is incompetent to mount a defense against the virus has decided to seize the data and mount a P.R. offensive.
The analogy is imperfect, but there is precedent for this sort of thing — Lysenkoism, in Russia. There, during the Stalin era, biologists who accepted evolution were fired, imprisoned, sometimes executed. Ideology mattered more than facts and science and, when applied to agriculture, it caused widespread starvation.
Kind of like the way that Happy Talk during a pandemic can cause tens of thousands of needless deaths.