Trump’s Coronavirus Data Grab is Working, for Him

The Trump administration swooped in and assumed control over coronavirus data on July 15th, re-routing information related to the pandemic away from the Centers for Disease Control to the Department of Health and Human Services. The excuse for this was that the HHS had a “new and faster” data system, but of course, no evidence of that was forthcoming.

The data grab wrests control of Covid-19 information away from the medical data system set in place to specifically deal with infectious diseases and places it under the control of Trump lackey and big pharma lobbyist Alex Azar. The CDC was broadsided in all this. Trump had insisted that they back down on testing and change the safety guidelines implemented to save lives, and when they didn’t, he seized their data, routing it away from the CDC and through his administration.

Prior to the data grab, the number of new cases in the US was setting nearly daily records, rising from 26,257 on June 14th to a staggering 74,987 by July 17th, a jump of nearly 50,000 new cases per day.

Since pandemic information has started being officially reported from HHS on July 17th, however, data on new confirmed cases of the virus and deaths have seemed suspiciously rosy. New cases reported on July 18th came in at 63,259, a sudden improvement of 11,728 cases. Over the last 3 days…