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For months, Michael Caputo worked vigorously behind the scenes to shape the health department’s pandemic messaging by contradicting career scientists, disputing coronavirus research and prioritizing President Donald Trump’s electoral fortunes. But within hours of Caputo’s abrupt departure for medical leave on Wednesday, Trump went out and did much the same thing – only in public and from the White House briefing room. (Cancryn, 9/17)

President Trump’s latest broadside against one of his administration’s public health officials has shined a spotlight on his distrust of experts and placed Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Robert Redfield in a potentially untenable position. The president on Wednesday contradicted Redfield’s congressional testimony on vaccine distribution and the efficacy of masks, telling reporters he phoned the CDC director to inform him he was mistaken. (Samuels and Weixel, 9/17)

Robert Redfield’s statement was unambiguous: A Covid-19 vaccine, he said, might not be available to much of the American public until mid- or late 2021. But in the next 10 hours, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention came under attack from President Trump, attempted to walk back his prior statement by plainly mischaracterizing his own words, and then, inexplicably, retracted his own reversal. (Facher, 9/17)

White House officials insist that President Donald Trump strongly supports face masks to prevent the spread of coronavirus and always has. But the president’s own words and actions tell a very different — and sometimes puzzling — story. That’s created a gulf between Trump and public health officials that keeps widening six months after the virus took root in the U.S., with the president undercutting medical experts who say consistent face covering is one of the best tools to fight the pandemic. (Superville and Maadhani, 9/17)

President Donald Trump’s congressional allies and White House aides backed his rebuke of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield on Thursday, insisting they trusted the president over the nation’s top public health official on matters of face masks and vaccine development. “If I just take the words of the CDC and the president, the president is right,” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said at a news conference, pledging that the U.S. would “have a safe and effective vaccine this year.” (Forgey, 9/17)

A prominent public health official on Thursday lamented the politicization of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) after a public spat a day earlier between Donald Trump and the CDC director, Dr Robert Redfield, a medical doctor, over masks and a Covid-19 vaccine. The president said Redfield was “confused” about the timeline for a coronavirus vaccine and attacked Redfield over his assertion that masks are “the most important, powerful public health tool we have” to combat coronavirus. Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, said on ABC’s Good Morning America on Thursday that there was no doubt about which man was confused. “The doctor is right” about masks, Jha said. (McCarthy, 9/17)

President Donald Trump is facing backlash after blaming blue states for the coronavirus death toll during a press briefing at the White House on Wednesday. "So we’re down in this territory," Trump said, pointing to a graph that the White House first unveiled in the spring which showed two estimated ranges of possible death tolls depending on efforts to slow the spread of the virus. "And that’s despite the fact that the blue states had had tremendous death rates. If you take the blue states out, we’re at a level that I don’t think anybody in the world would be at. We’re really at a very low level. But some of the states, they were blue states and blue state-managed." (Thomas and Pecorin, 9/17)

Scott Atlas, one of President Trump’s coronavirus advisers, is threatening to sue a group of Stanford doctors and researchers after they penned a public letter calling out “falsehoods” and “misrepresentations” of science around COVID-19. Atlas, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution who has questioned the science of wearing masks to stop the spread of COVID-19, has made claims that “run counter to established science” and undermines public health authorities by doing so, 78 researchers and doctors wrote in the Sept. 9 letter posted on Stanford's website. (Hellmann, 9/17)

Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar will appear in front of the House Oversight and Reform Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis as his agency faces a whirlwind of controversies. The panel’s chairman, Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.) announced Thursday that Azar will appear in front of the committee on Oct. 2 to testify on the Trump administration’s response to the coronavirus pandemic. (Axelrod, 9/17)