The US federal government will no longer be requiring hospitals to report the number of people who die from covid every day.
WSWS reports: The move by the Biden administration to weaken the reporting of COVID-19 deaths has direct precedents in the Trump administration. The House COVID Subcommittee’s 2021 year-end report said “Trump Administration officials purposefully weakened CDC’s coronavirus testing guidance in August 2020 to obscure how rapidly the virus was spreading across the country.”
Although the new HHS guidelines were issued on January 6, they were not made known until publicized by Dr. Jorge A. Caballero, a medical doctor and Clinical Instructor at Stanford university, on Twitter.
On Friday afternoon, Dr. Caballero wrote, “I’d love to understand why the federal government will no longer require hospitals to report the daily number of #COVID19 deaths as of February 2nd”
Caballero retweeted a response by this reporter noting that the same day the HHS published the updated guidance, Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, a former Biden administration COVID-19 advisor and advocate of eugenics, published an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) calling on governments to “retire” the reporting of deaths from COVID-19.
Emanuel’s call for a “new normal” was hailed with an editorial in the Washington Post and a lead interview on NBC’s Meet the Press, the most prominent of the US Sunday talk-shows.
Although hospitals will still report to state health authorities, and via the states to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), many states, led by Republican Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, are themselves moving to shut down daily COVID-19 reporting, or have already done so.
The CDC has been in discussions with the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists about a directive that “would direct states to limit daily case reporting,” according to a report published December 30 in the New York Times.
States led by far-right Republicans are already slashing testing and reporting.
Tennessee, run by the far-right governor Bill Lee, who refused to recognize the election of US president Joe Biden, has already stopped daily case reporting, switching to a once-per-week system of reporting tests.
Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo said last month that the state intended to “unwind” the “testing mentality.” Ladapo reports to DeSantis, a right-wing ideologue who also refused to acknowledge the outcome of the 2020 election.
Even more states plan to end daily reporting of cases, with many “that are still doing daily reporting eager to make the shift in the coming months,” Marcelle Layton, chief medical officer at the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists, told the Times.
After WSWS reporters verified that Caballero was correctly summarizing the HHS guidance, our report summarizing his findings was shared more than 6,000 times and viewed by more than two million people on Twitter.
