Sources: CDC Staff Being "Muzzled", White House Prioritizing Politics Over Science.
COOPER: Time and time again, President Trump has blamed China for the coronavirus outbreak, even threatening retaliation when it comes to the trade wars. There is certainly evidence to show China has not been transparent when it comes to information about the disease. CNN has been reporting that from the early days of this. But what about domestic political considerations when it comes to some scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention? Here's senior investigative correspondent, Drew Griffin.</s>DREW GRIFFIN, CNN SENIOR INVESTIGATIVE CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Multiple sources inside the Centers for Disease Control tell CNN they are convinced politics, not science, is the driving force behind the White House response to COVID-19, and those decisions have made the effects of the pandemic in the United States worse.</s>DR. JAMES CURRAN, DEAN OF ROLLINS SCHOOL OF PUBLIC HEALTH, EMORY UNIVERSITY: Now, there hasn't been as much input from the CDC, from my point of view.</s>GRIFFIN (voice-over): CNN spoke to six current CDC staff members, and many of them say the White House has stifled the CDC in its coronavirus response. And at times ,limited its ability to provide health information to the public. One source telling CNN, "We are working under a black cloud of an administration that doesn't have our backs." Another saying, "We've been muzzled." Dr. James Curran is Dean of Public Health at Emory University, and former assistant surgeon general at the</s>CDC. GRIFFIN (on camera): Has the CDC been sidelined here?</s>CURRAN: I think the perception is that the CDC has been sidelined at least part of the time. Once you feel like the work you're doing is going through a political lens, it gets to be very, very discouraging.</s>GRIFFIN (voice-over): On March 2nd, as COVID-19 was racing across the globe, a CDC internal daily report obtained by CNN found evidence of local transmission in 29 other countries. Two days later, that had grown to 85 international locations. The next day, March 5th, three of the top six countries affected by the disease are in Europe. Internal emails reveal a CDC global travel alert is about to be issued, expected to be posted that night. It would have urged precautions for international travel anywhere, almost two months after a travel warning had been issued for China, but it was delayed for unexplained reasons. The travel alert that was supposed to be posted March 5th does not take place until March 11th, the same day President Trump would announce his restrictions on most flights coming in from Europe.</s>DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: We will be suspending all travel from Europe to the United States for the next 30 days.</s>GRIFFIN (voice-over): Each day of delay bringing exponentially more coronavirus exposure to the east coast of the United States, according to Dr. Ali Khan, a former CDC official.</s>DR. ALI KHAN, FORMER DIRECTOR, CDC OFFICE OF PUBLIC HEALTH PREPAREDNESS AND RESPONSE: Those were the days when these cases were essentially being transported via air travel. We now have really good genetic data that probably between two to six weeks before we started to see the peak in New York, cases were already slowly spreading within the New York area.</s>GRIFFIN (voice-over): One senior official inside the CDC says they told the White House about the virus's rapid spread across Europe, but that the White House was extremely focused on China and not wanting to anger Europe, even though that's where most of our cases were originally coming from. Khan says, the original sin, as he calls it, was the botched testing at the CDC that lost time and allowed politics to intervene.</s>KHAN: And if we had testing in place, people very quickly would have recognized that there were cases in the U.S., probably in early January, that were being missed. Similarly, we would have identified people coming in from Europe if we had widespread testing across the United States.</s>COOPER: And Drew joins me now. Drew, have you heard from the White House or CDC about this?</s>GRIFFIN: No. No answer to any of our questions, and that's not surprising, Anderson, given the politics of the situation. But these experts, these CDC officials say that's exactly what we don't need. We don't need politics in this. We need science and data to drive decision making, and right now, the CDC is being shunned at the White House. Anderson.</s>COOPER: Drew, thanks. Drew Griffin. Up next, we remember some of the victims of the coronavirus, including the wife of John Glenn, a nurse who broke barriers in the 1950s, and a retired paramedic who gave his life to save others.