Here is frightening news. The Trump administration is politicizing this, lying about it, and suppressing the truth the way the Chinese government did.
Pence Will Control All Coronavirus Messaging From Health Officials https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/27/us/politics/us-coronavirus-pence.html Here is a similar story in the WaPost text, from behind the paywall: Whistleblower: Workers at risk aiding evacuees Complainant alleges she was targeted for raising concerns. By Lena H. Sun and Yasmeen Abutaleb Washington Post WASHINGTON -Officials at the Department of Health and Human Services sent more than a dozen workers to receive the first Americans evacuated from Wuhan, China, the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak, without proper training for infection control or appropriate protective gear, according to a whistleblower complaint. The workers did not show symptoms of infection and were not tested for the virus, according to lawyers for the whistleblower, who is a senior HHS official based in Washington who oversees workers at the Administration for Children and Families, a unit within HHS. The whistleblower is seeking federal protection because she alleges she was unfairly and improperly reassigned after raising concerns about the safety of these workers to HHS officials, including those within the office of Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar. She was told Feb. 19 that if she does not accept the new position in 15 days, which is March 5, she would be terminated. The whistleblower has decades of experience in the field, received two HHS department awards from Azar last year and has received the highest performance evaluations, her lawyers said. The complaint was filed Wednesday with the Office of the Special Counsel, an independent federal watchdog agency. The whistleblower's lawyers provided a copy of a redacted 24-page complaint to The Washington Post. A spokesman for the Office of the Special Counsel said he could not comment on complaints filed with the office. . . . The complaint alleges that HHS staff were "improperly deployed" and were "not properly trained or equipped to operate in a public health emergency situation." The complaint also alleges that the workers were potentially exposed to coronavirus because appropriate steps were not taken to protect them, and staff were not trained in wearing personal protective equipment, even though they had face-to-face contact with returning passengers. The workers were in contact with passengers in an airplane hangar where evacuees were received and on two other occasions: when they helped distribute keys for room assignments and hand out colored ribbons for identification purposes. . . . A second person familiar with the situation said the workers were not tested for coronavirus because none of them met the criteria for testing, which only calls for testing people who had recent travel to China or contact with a confirmed case. The workers also did not exhibit any symptoms, the person said. If they had, appropriate protocol would have been followed. The deployments took place Jan. 28 to 31, around the time when the first planeload of evacuees arrived at March, and Feb. 2 to Feb. 7, during the time when additional flights were arriving at Travis. The planes each carried about 200 Americans repatriated from Wuhan. After their deployments, the workers returned to their normal duties, some taking commercial airline flights to return to their offices around the country, the lawyers said.
