Behind the White House Effort to Pressure the CDC on School Openings

WASHINGTON — Top White House officials pressured the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this summer to play down the risk of sending children back to school, a strikingly political intervention in one of the most sensitive public health debates of the pandemic, according to documents and interviews with current and former government officials.

One member of Pence’s staff said she was repeatedly asked by Marc Short, the vice president’s chief of staff, to get the CDC to produce more reports and charts showing a decline in coronavirus cases among young people. “I was appalled when I found out that Marc Short was tasking more junior staff in the office of the vice president to develop charts” for White House briefings, she said.

In another instance, Birx took a direct role in an effort to push the CDC to incorporate work from a little-known agency inside the Department of Health and Human Services, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. But the gist of the mental health agency’s position — stressing the potential risks of children not attending school — became the introductory text of the final CDC policy, leaving some officials there dismayed.

The seven-page draft conceded that scientists were “still learning about how it spreads, how it affects children and what role children may play in its spread,” and that limited data suggested that children were less likely to get the virus than adults. More recently, data compiled by the academy from recent months shows that hospitalizations and deaths from the coronavirus have increased at a faster rate in children and teenagers than among the general public.

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