The Trump regime floated a proposal this week for deploying the National Guard to collect coronavirus information from hospitals. Hospitals are too slow to report on their own, the regime says, for any preventative measures to work against the virus.
I read that as an attempt to blame hospitals for the regime's failures -- and maybe it was -- but they now appear to have had a different motivation altogether and what they really wanted to accomplish was establish control over the flow of information.
The Trump White House has ordered hospitals to report their data to a private database at the Department of Health and Human Services rather than the CDC's public database.
The move could make data less transparent to the public at a time when the administration is downplaying the spread of the pandemic, and threatens to undermine public confidence that medical data is being presented free of political interference. [...]
The Times said hospitals are to begin reporting the data to HHS on Wednesday, noting also that the "database that will receive new information is not open to the public, which could affect the work of scores of researchers, modelers and health officials who rely on C.D.C. data to make projections and crucial decisions."
HHS assistant secretary Michael Caputo says the "new" and "faster" database is what we need to defeat the coronavirus. The CDC's database was too slow, he says.
I don't buy that, but let's take that a face value for a moment.
If a new database is all we needed, that would mean hospitals actually are capable of reporting their data in a timely manner. And if that's true, the rationale behind the proposal to use the National Guard for data collection was a lie. If hospitals were the root of a problem, a new database in Washington wouldn't solve it.
I think the only way you could be willing to take the Trump regime's word on this would be if you paid exactly zero attention over the past four years.
This moves comes from the same White House that says the reason we have so many infections is because we're testing too much.
We hit another record of over 67,400 cases in the past 24 hours.