Leonard H. Calabrese, DO

This latest change is further undermining of the national response to the COVID-19 epidemic by the Trump administration. It merely is taking one more step to marginalize science, which will likely lead to further confusion as to whom the public should be listening about the pandemic. The CDC, a scientific body, embraces science and data and accordingly can be wrong but admits to such faults as part of the scientific process. The organization is a national treasure and needs more support, not marginalization. This is a step in the wrong direction in my opinion.

Peter Chin-Hong, MD

This is part of an entire modus operandi of the administration, which is to distance  scientific rigor from politics — whether that is muffling the voice of the CDC, discrediting Fauci or moving our scientific leaders out of the forefront of the public during COVID-19. Bringing COVID-19 data to the White House will have the disquieting effect of politicizing “science,” but bereft of the rigor and oversight that we are accustomed to — or expect — in our country and among our scientific peers around the world.

It shouldn't be surprising, but it is power, and I think many in the scientific community are worried that this decision would shape how the public sees the administration's handling of COVID-19. Beyond that, when you look into the details, it has the power to do a lot more damage — particularly in the reporting of disaggregated data by race and ethnicity. This could have a significant effect on the way the public sees the contribution of COVID-19 to health disparities, including the regional variation seen. That is important at a time when we have the George Floyd protests, which has drawn attention to structural racism and its impact on health care.

The other impact it will have — one that is not immediately obvious — is on the way that remdesivir is potentially allocated. Currently HHS uses a formula based on COVID-19 epidemiology by state to determine how much remdesivir each state is allocated. If you are trying to justify why some states have more remdesivir than others using numbers as your rationale, that could lead to potential disparities in its allocation based on other factors beyond the numbers.

The third impact would be on things that people are currently debating — for example, whether to open schools in person. You can look at data a certain way by presenting the disease's effects on kids, which is low, but that is not necessarily showing the impact of transmission from children to adults. Data is power, and if you hold the data, if you have an agenda (which is politics), you can shape the data that you show to the public and in a way that supports the point you want to make.

Data are data, and it is up to you to interpret them. But if the government shows data, one would worry that the interpretation has already been done, and the display of the data reflects that interpretation in the reverse order that we are accustomed to.

That is the big worry, and it follows a precedent. Recently, Brazil's government, whose actions parallel those of our administration, didn't want to report COVID-19 data to the rest of the world because it made them look bad. It comes back to early COVID-19 when Trump pushed back against people disembarking off an infected cruise ship (Grand Princess) and essentially said, "these is not our data; these are from somewhere else." He has always been incensed by data, and not necessarily in a scientific way. Data have been often shaped by his opinions, which is not science. You should present data objectively and then have people interpret them.

Ultimately, the question is, "Who owns the data?" Certainly, the people own the data, and the states can still continue to report their own, but it depends on each state's leadership to be transparent. In our country, the expectation that political leaders have transparency is so polarized now that I am not sure that every state will necessarily be able to do that. That is why the loss of an objective national reporting system for COVID-19 in the United States is especially damning.