COVID19 Update - Day 186

US Tests: 86,086,240*

US Cases: 6,449,208*

US Deaths: 185,630*

Worldwide Cases: 28,660,123*

Worldwide Deaths: 919,081*

* - Numbers are a lower bound.  True numbers are being suppressed by the Trump administration

This shit has really got to stop.

The CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports are authored by career scientists and serve as the main vehicle for the agency to inform doctors, researchers and the general public about how Covid-19 is spreading and who is at risk. Such reports have historically been published with little fanfare and no political interference, said several longtime health department officials, and have been viewed as a cornerstone of the nation's public health work for decades.

But since Michael Caputo, a former Trump campaign official with no medical or scientific background, was installed in April as the Health and Human Services department's new spokesperson, there have been substantial efforts to align the reports with Trump's statements, including the president's claims that fears about the outbreak are overstated, or stop the reports altogether.

Caputo and his team have attempted to add caveats to the CDC's findings, including an effort to retroactively change agency reports that they said wrongly inflated the risks of Covid-19 and should have made clear that Americans sickened by the virus may have been infected because of their own behavior, according to the individuals familiar with the situation and emails reviewed by POLITICO.

Caputo's team also has tried to halt the release of some CDC reports, including delaying a report that addressed how doctors were prescribing hydroxychloroquine, the malaria drug favored by Trump as a coronavirus treatment despite scant evidence. The report, which was held for about a month after Caputo’s team raised questions about its authors’ political leanings, was finally published last week. It said that "the potential benefits of these drugs do not outweigh their risks."

When Trump was impeached, idiots like Susan Collins claimed that he had "learned a lesson" from the impeachment process, and promptly voted to acquit him.  And indeed, he did learn a lesson.  He learned that he can do practically anything he likes without consequence.  And he is.  He's remaking the CDC, the USPS, the DOJ, and any other arm of government you can name into a tool to serve his needs, rather than serving America.

If we aren't able to defeat Trump and his GOP enablers at the polls in November --- and resoundingly --- America as we know it won't be recognizable in four years.