US administration accused of politically meddling with response to COVID-19 pandemic

WASHINGTON - A US House panel on the COVID-19 pandemic on Thursday accused the US current administration of politically meddling with the country's response to the public health crisis.

"I am deeply concerned that the Trump Administration's political meddling with the nation's coronavirus response has put American lives at greater risk," James Clyburn, chairman of the House Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis, said in a letter to the administration's top health officials.

Clyburn also said the panel is concerned that some officials "may have taken steps to conceal and destroy evidence of this dangerous conduct", while urging cooperation in the investigation of the allegations.

The letter, addressed to Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) Alex Azar and Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Robert Redfield, came days after the subcommittee's transcribed interview with Charlotte Kent, chief of the Scientific Publications Branch and Editor-in-Chief of the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report at CDC.

During the interview, Kent stated that she was instructed to delete an Aug 8 email sent by then-HHS senior advisor Paul Alexander to her, Redfield, and HHS Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Michael Caputo, adding that she was informed that the direction to delete the email came from Redfield.

The email from Alexander demanded that CDC insert new language in a previously published scientific report on coronavirus risks to children or "pull it down and stop all reports immediately", according to Clyburn's letter.

"I was instructed to delete the email," Kent said in the interview. "I went to look for it after I had been told to delete it, and it was already gone." When asked who deleted the email, she replied, "I have no idea ... I considered this to be very unusual."

Federal law requires the heads of federal agencies to preserve records, including emails. Neither Azar nor Redfield has responded to the allegations.

More than 15.5 million people in the United States have been diagnosed with COVID-19, with some 291,000 deaths, according to latest tallies by Johns Hopkins University on Thursday. The country on Wednesday set a new record for single-day deaths from the virus, with 3,054.

"We are in the timeframe now that probably for the next 60 to 90 days we're going to have more deaths per day than we had at 9/11 or we had at Pearl Harbor," Redfield said during an event hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations on Thursday.