Title: Trump’s CDC chief faces increasingly harsh scrutiny - POLITICO
Headings: Trump’s CDC chief faces increasingly harsh scrutiny
Trump’s CDC chief faces increasingly harsh scrutiny
Content: Top Trump advisers have worried that panic over a still-unseen U.S. outbreak could threaten the president’s reelection, and Azar and other officials have spent the past two days working to calm the public reaction to Messonnier’s comments. Nancy Messonnier, who leads CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases. | Samuel Corum/Getty Images
But Messonnier’s remarks, and her high profile during the coronavirus fight, speak to a reality at CDC: Unlike other parts of the Trump administration, where career civil servants have fled and political appointees have made over operations, the sprawling CDC operation and its global staff have largely retained their independence. More than 80 percent of CDC scientists polled in 2018 said the agency continued to uphold its scientific principles under Trump, compared with less than 40 percent of scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency. Meanwhile, many longtime CDC staffers have played a key role in fighting the coronavirus outbreak, like principal deputy director Anne Schuchat and Messonnier, who’s become a target for right-wing talk radio because she’s the sister of former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. In front of a Senate appropriations panel on Tuesday, Azar defended the public-health agency for its round-the-clock response to a possible outbreak, arguing that it’s played an essential role in staving off an outbreak that remains largely theoretical in the United States. “We are now,