Trump Health Aide Falsely Alleges Conspiracies and Warns of Armed Revolt

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Specializes in Critical care, tele, Medical-Surgical.

Michael Caputo, the assistant secretary of health for public affairs, told a facebook audience without evidence that left-wing hit squads were being trained for insurrection, and he accused C.D.C. scientists of “sedition.”

The top communications official at the powerful cabinet department in charge of combating the coronavirus made outlandish and false claims on Sunday that career government scientists were engaging in “sedition” in their handling of the pandemic and warned that left-wing hit squads were preparing for armed insurrection after the election.

Michael Caputo, 58, the assistant secretary of public affairs at the Department of Health and Human Services, said without evidence that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was harboring a “resistance unit” determined to undermine President Trump.

Mr. Caputo, who has faced criticism for leading efforts to warp C.D.C. weekly bulletins to fit Mr. Trump’s pandemic narrative, suggested that he personally could be in danger...

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/14/us/caputo-virus.html 

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Specializes in Critical care, tele, Medical-Surgical.

Trump officials interfered with CDC reports on Covid-19

The politically appointed HHS spokesperson and his team demanded and received the right to review CDC’s scientific reports to health professionals.

In some cases, emails from communications aides to CDC Director Robert Redfield and other senior officials openly complained that the agency’s reports would undermine President Donald Trump's optimistic messages about the outbreak, according to emails reviewed by POLITICO and three people familiar with the situation...

...   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...

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/09/11/exclusive-trump-officials-interfered-with-CDC-reports-on-covid-19-412809 

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Something is rotten in the state of Denmark. 
                         (Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Act I)



Thanks herring for posting this! (My likes of your posts are of course for sharing the information, not for the content since it’s pretty frightening). 

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Specializes in NICU, PICU, Transport, L&D, Hospice.
14 minutes ago, macawake said:

Something is rotten in the state of Denmark. 
                         (Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Act I)



Thanks herring for posting this! (My likes of your posts are of course for sharing the information, not for the content since it’s pretty frightening). 

Incredibly frightening...

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Specializes in Critical Care.

He's been sharing various paranoid delusions over the past few weeks on Twitter and facebook, and even just came right out and said that his "mental health has definitely failed".  Most people might see his statements a need for help, to Trump he's clearly fit to be one of the top people responsible for managing a pandemic.

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Specializes in Public Health, TB.

Having such a person meddling with the information distributed by the CDC is disturbing. I work in public health and we always referenced CDC guidelines as accurate and reliable and now they are almost a dirty word. I worry about undoing all the harm this administration has done to our countries agencies. 

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Specializes in Med-Surg, Trauma, Ortho, Neuro, Cardiac.

This didn't age well, but it does go to show that my idea that Trump and his administration has set the seeds for January 6th long before he was defeated.

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In his facebook Live video on Sunday, Caputo also said the shooting in Portland of a Trump supporter was a "drill” and predicted there will be shootings on inauguration day -- calling on Trump supporters to buy gun ammunition. 

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/caputo-apologizes-blasting-CDC-evidence-anti-trump-resistance/story?id=73020213

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