The CDC's memory hole
Welcome to Popular Information, a newsletter about politics and power — written by me, Judd Legum.
I wanted to update you on some developments related to my reporting on the coronavirus. As I discussed in yesterday's edition, a critical failure in the Trump administration's response was the lack of testing. As of Friday, fewer than 500 people had been tested in the United States. Other countries, like South Korea, have tested tens of thousands.
Why so few in the United States? The Trump administration insisted on creating its own test, but it didn't work properly. This failure was compounded when the administration refused to obtain functional testing kits from the World Health Organization or commercial vendors. As a result, the coronavirus spread undetected for weeks inside the United States. Six people have died in Washington State.
On Monday, I noticed that the CDC had stopped disclosing the number of Americans that have been tested on its website. I post an image on Twitter, showing how the CDC had removed this critical information.
As of this writing, that tweet has been shared over 21,000 times. The story was quickly picked up nationally and internationally in publications like The Verge, Politico, and The Daily Mail.
By Wednesday afternoon, Congressman Mark Pocan (D-WI) wrote a letter to the CDC, demanding the agency explain itself and resume disclosing the information.
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