The war on children, federal edition

The Times ran a disturbing article today about the White House pressure campaign on the CDC this summer to modify the guidance they were putting out about reopening schools. They were trying to get the CDC to play down the risks and accentuate the benefits of reopening. Of course, this isn’t exactly a secret, since it was fairly clear they were doing that this summer – but it’s still amazing to see this confirmed in black and white.

What I find most amazing though, is the fact that Dr. Deborah Birx took an active role in this process. She asked Dr. Redfield to include in the introduction to the guidance a quote from a little-known agency within DHS to the effect that “very few reports of children being the primary source of Covid-19 transmission among family members have emerged”. It also asserted that children who were asymptomatic “are unlikely to spread the virus.”

The former statement was misleading, given that the science still isn’t definitive on that topic either way. And the latter is a misrepresentation of the science (someone less charitable might call it a “lie”), since younger children have been shown to be at least as likely to spread the virus if asymptomatic, and perhaps more likely. There is little data on this, since children are seldom tested if they’re asymptomatic, but if you don’t have much data, you should always err on the side of caution, not airily state “Don’t worry about the kids. They’ll be fine. Why, Dr. Trump himself says so!”

Dr. Birx was only partially successful in her effort to get the CDC to change their guidance. And of course Trump never had the power to push schools to reopen, since those decisions are controlled on the state and local level (I’ll discuss how badly that can go in another post soon). But I do believe Dr. Birx deserves a medal for valor in the federal War on Children.

She has been a disaster in the White House. The Times made it clear in a great article a couple months ago that, despite having no epidemiological background, she became convinced in April that the virus would disappear very soon. Soon, she was meeting daily with the Chief of Staff and provided the “science” that guided the Trump administration’s disastrous push to get states to reopen before they should have. I thought the best that could be said for her lately was that she had pretty much shut up for the last few months, but now it turns out she was actively working behind the scenes to make sure that the burden of the failed US response to the novel coronavirus was shared as equally as possible between children and adults. After all, kids have the right to endanger their and their families’ health, too - just like adults. 

I would love to hear any comments or questions you have on this post. Drop me an email at tom@tomalrich.com