CDC officials: White House driven by politics, not science over COVID-19

Staff members in the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said the White House has been driven by politics rather than science in its response to the COVID-19 pandemic, a CNN report revealed on Wednesday. 

A senior CDC official also criticized the Trump administration for focusing on China instead of Europe in early March, allowing large numbers of European travelers to enter the United States when transmissions in Europe were mounting. 

In interviews with CNN, CDC officials said the agency's efforts to address the global outbreak "have been hamstrung by a White House whose decisions are driven by politics rather than science," the report said. 

"We've been muzzled," said a current CDC official. "What's tough is that if we would have acted earlier on what we knew and recommended, we would have saved lives and money." 

Although the CDC alerted the White House of the rapid spread of the coronavirus on March 2, Trump did not announce strict travel restrictions on more than two dozen European countries until March 11. 

"The White House was extremely focused on China and not wanting to anger Europe ... even though that's where most of our cases were originally coming from," said a CDC official.

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