AP Exclusive: US shelves detailed guide to reopening country
By JASON DEAREN and MIKE STOBBE today
GAINESVILLE, Fla. (AP) — A document created by the nation’s top disease investigators with step-by-step advice to local authorities on how and when to reopen restaurants and other public places during the still-raging outbreak has been shelved by the Trump administration.
The 17-page report by a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention team, titled “Guidance for Implementing the Opening Up America Again Framework,” .. https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6883734-CDC-Business-Plans.html .. was researched and written to help faith leaders, business owners, educators and state and local officials as they begin to reopen.
It was supposed to be published last Friday, but agency scientists were told the guidance “would never see the light of day,” according to a CDC official. The official was not authorized to talk to reporters and spoke to The Associated Press on the condition of anonymity.
The AP obtained a copy from a second federal official who was not authorized to release it. The guidance was described in AP stories last week, prior to the White House decision to shelve it. .. https://apnews.com/2a1cf36c0ad1ae31938351f6f74abe28
The Trump administration has been closely controlling the release of guidance and information during the pandemic spurred by a new coronavirus that scientists are still trying to understand, with the president himself leading freewheeling daily briefings until last week.
Traditionally, it’s been the CDC’s role to give the public and local officials guidance and science-based information during public health crises. During this one, however, the CDC has not had a regular, pandemic-related news briefing in nearly two months. CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield has been a member of the White House coronavirus task force, but largely absent from public appearances. The dearth of real-time, public information from the nation’s experts has struck many current and former government health officials as dangerous.
“CDC has always been the public health agency Americans turn to in a time of crisis,” said Dr. Howard Koh, a Harvard professor and former health official in the Obama administration during the H1N1 swine flu pandemic in 2009. “The standard in a crisis is to turn to them for the latest data and latest guidance and the latest press briefing. That has not occurred, and everyone sees that.”
The Trump administration has instead sought to put the onus on states to handle COVID-19 response. This approach to managing the pandemic has been reflected in President Donald Trump’s public statements, from the assertion that he isn’t responsible for the country’s lackluster early testing efforts, to his description last week of the federal government’s role as a “supplier of last resort” for states in need of testing aid.
White House spokeswoman Kayleigh McEnany echoed that at a briefing Wednesday: “We’ve consulted individually with states, but as I said, it’s (a) governor-led effort. It’s a state-led effort on ... which the federal government will consult. And we do so each and every day.”
The rejected reopening guidance was described by one of the federal officials as a touchstone document that was to be used as a blueprint for other groups inside the CDC who are creating the same type of instructional materials for other facilities.
The guidance contained detailed advice for making site-specific decisions related to reopening schools, restaurants, summer camps, churches, day care centers and other institutions. It had been widely shared within the CDC and included detailed “decision trees,” flow charts to be used by local officials to think through different scenarios. One page of the document can be found on the CDC website via search engines, but it did not appear to be linked to any other CDC pages.
Some of the report’s suggestions already appear on federal websites. But the guidance offered specific, tailored recommendations for reopening in one place.
For example, the report suggested restaurants and bars should install sneeze guards at cash registers and avoid having buffets, salad bars and drink stations. Similar tips appear on the CDC’s site and a Food and Drug Administration page.
But the shelved report also said that as restaurants start seating diners again, they should space tables at least 6 feet (1.8 meters) apart and try to use phone app technology to alert a patron when their table is ready to avoid touching and use of buzzers. That’s not on the CDC’s site now.
“You can say that restaurants can open and you need to follow social distancing guidelines. But restaurants want to know, ‘What does that look like?’ States would like more guidance,” said Dr. Marcus Plescia, chief medical officer of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials.
The White House’s own “Opening Up America Again” guidelines released last month were more vague than the CDC’s unpublished report. They instructed state and local governments to reopen in accordance with federal and local “regulations and guidance” and to monitor employees for symptoms of COVID-19. The White House guidance also included advice developed earlier in the pandemic that remains important like social distancing and encouraging working from home.
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A person close to the White House’s coronavirus task force said the CDC documents were never cleared by CDC leadership for public release. The person said that White House officials have refrained from offering detailed guidance for how specific sectors should reopen because the virus is affecting various parts of the country differently. The person spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.
The CDC is hearing daily from state and county health departments looking for scientifically valid information with which to make informed decisions.
Still, behind the scenes, CDC scientists like those who produced the guidance for “Opening Up America Again? are working to get information to local governments. The agency still employs hundreds of the world’s most respected epidemiologists and doctors, who in times of crisis are looked to for their expertise, said former CDC director Tom Frieden. People have clicked on the CDC’s coronavirus website more than 1.2 billion times.
States that directly reach out to the CDC can tap guidance that’s been prepared but that the White House has not released.
“I don’t think that any state feels that the CDC is deficient. It’s just the process of getting stuff out,” Plescia said.
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Stobbe reported from New York. Associated Press writers Darlene Superville and Zeke Miller in Washington contributed to this report.
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The Associated Press receives support for health and science coverage from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
Days before the Wuhan wet market was bleached, whistleblowers were punished and virus samples were destroyed, someone at the high-security Wuhan Institute of Virology censored its virus database in an apparent attempt to disassociate the laboratory from a novel-coronavirus outbreak that would become a global pandemic.
This is what open-source intelligence uncovered in the United Kingdom reveals.
Substantial alterations to the WIV database on the evening of Dec. 30, the day before the World Health Organization was alerted to the outbreak of a cluster of pneumonia cases in Wuhan, are just another indication that the Chinese Communist Party is hiding something when it comes to the origins of COVID-19.
The question of whether the virus came from the Wuhan wet market, as China insists, or leaked from the nearby WIV laboratory, where high-risk research into animal-to-human transmission of bat coronaviruses was being conducted, is at the center of allegations of a coverup and a worldwide clamor for an independent investigation into the source of the disease.
Shi Zhengli, the virologist known as China’s “batwoman” for her work with bat coronaviruses, directs the WIV’s Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases and is listed as the primary database contact.
On Dec. 30, she was in Shanghai for a conference when she was summoned back to Wuhan with the news that a novel coronavirus had been detected in two pneumonia patients.
On the overnight train from Shanghai, according to a March article in Scientific American, she was stricken with worry about the coronaviruses.
“Could they have come from our lab?” she wondered.
After all, the closest known relative of this new coronavirus, a bat virus named RaTG13, was in her lab.
Weeks later, she would post a message on WeChat saying, “I swear with my life, [the virus] has nothing to do with the lab.”
But at some point while she was on that train ride to Wuhan, alterations were made to her database, which contained records of bat viruses transmitted to other wild animals.
Most of the changes were to delete the keywords “wildlife” or “wild animals.” This is significant, because global health researchers say the virus jumped from bats to humans via another wild animal — the crucial “missing link” in the COVID-19 transmission chain.
Shi used to boast that her bat-virus database was unique because it included data on virus variants in other wild animals.
Was her database censored to keep prying eyes away from references to cross-species transmission of viruses in wild animals?
For instance, the title of the database was changed that night from “Wildlife-borne viral pathogen database” to “Bat and rodent-borne viral pathogen database.”
“Wild animal” was replaced with “bat and rodent” or “bat and rat” at least 10 times in the database. Also, a reference to “arthropod vectors” was removed.
Keywords that might facilitate searches potentially connecting the database with the outbreak also were deleted. “Wild animal samples,” “viral pathogen data,” “emerging infectious diseases” and “cross-species infection” were keywords associated with the original version.
On Dec. 30 they were replaced with “bat,” “rodent” and “virus.”
“It looks like a rushed, inconsistent effort to disassociate the project from the outbreak by rebranding it,” says the British open-source intelligence analyst who found the alterations.
“It’s a strange thing to do within hours of being informed of a novel-coronavirus outbreak.”
He surmises: “If the WIV had found the missing link between bat virus RaTG13 and SARS-CoV-2 [the coronavirus that causes COVID-19] from an animal vector, it would have been in Shi’s database.”
There’s no conclusive evidence that any of the changes were made for sinister reasons.
But China’s lies and furtive actions since the outbreak lead us to believe the worst.
“This is an enormous crisis created by the fact that the Chinese Communist Party reverted to form, reverted to the kinds of disinformation, the kinds of concealment, that authoritarian regimes do,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in an interview Sunday with ABC News.
“There is enormous evidence that [the Wuhan lab] is where this began . . .
“These are not the first times that we’ve had a world exposed to viruses as a result of failures in a Chinese lab.”
On Wednesday, Pompeo walked back his comments slightly at a press conference. “We don’t have certainty,” he said. “We’re all trying to get to clarity.”
China’s refusal to allow an investigation of the origins of the Wuhan virus, or even to share original virus samples, impedes the search for treatments and a vaccine. As if that weren’t bad enough, now it is threatening economic boycotts against countries like Australia that want an investigation.
“The CCP organizational and governmental culture is to cover up and ruthlessly control,” says a retired senior Australian intelligence officer who served in China.
“The arrest of frontline health professionals in January was standard practice.”
We don’t know why the changes were made to the WIV database.
What we do know is they were made the same day a young ophthalmologist, Dr. Li Wenliang, warned colleagues in an online chat group about a “SARS-like coronavirus” among patients in the emergency department of a Wuhan Hospital.
Li was arrested two days later, along with seven other doctors, for “spreading rumors” and forced to recant. He died a month later, of the coronavirus, at age 33.
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