The Lancet, one of the oldest and most esteemed medical journals in the world, has blamed President Donald Trump for "marginalizing and hobbling" the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention during the coronavirus pandemic.
For the CDC to recapture its effectiveness, the weekly, peer-reviewed general med journal said Trump needs to lose his reelection bid, a Lancet editorial declared.
"Americans must put a president in the White House come January, 2021, who will understand that public health should not be guided by partisan politics," reads an unsigned editorial in the Lancet, based in the U.K. "A strong CDC is needed to respond to public health threats, both domestic and international, and to help prevent the next inevitable pandemic."
The Trump administration received pushback for rejecting and then editing a report from the CDC outlining how businesses and local governments can reopen.
"The Trump administration further chipped away at the CDC's capacity to combat infectious diseases. CDC staff in China were cut back with the last remaining CDC officer recalled home from the China CDC in July, 2019, leaving an intelligence vacuum when COVID-19 began to emerge," the editorial read.
It maintained that the CDC, headquartered in Atlanta, was once a "pillar of public health and globally respected ... [but] funding to the CDC for a long time has been subject to conservative politics that have increasingly eroded the agency's ability."
The editorial blames the Trump administration, as well as Presidents George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan, for making damaging budget cuts to the agency.
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