There are ominous reports that demagogue and fraudster Donald "COVID Donnie" Trump is ordering the Department of Health and Human Services to overhaul how state and local governments provide public health data to the Federal government. Concerned as Trump is with reporting the number of COVID-19 cases rising ("slow the testing down, please") because it's a stark reminder of his failure, there are deep concerns that his regime will cripple or manipulate the data to falsely show the virus ebbing prior to the election.
The timing, as with the "kneecapping" of the Postal Service, is deeply suspicious:
"Skeptics wonder why President Donald Trump’s health department is launching such large-scale initiatives during a pandemic when state and local systems are already hard pressed. They also question if HHS has the know-how in place to accomplish the feat.
The department still is trying to fix the hospital database, called HHS Protect, which hospitals and states were required to use with little warning last month. Hospital operators and state health departments have reported numerous technical burdens that have forced some hospitals to manually enter data about ICU beds and drug supplies, and have led to unexplained fluctuations in hospital occupancy posted on public dashboards. [snip]
Democrats have suggested the way the changeover bypassed a CDC reporting system was part of a pattern in which the White House has undercut the public health agency for political gain." (our emphasis)It's clear that Trump will do anything to maintain power, including disrupting the process by which pandemic data is tracked and reported. This is another chaos project that needs Congressional and media scrutiny.
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