Current and former members of a committee advising the Centers for Disease Control criticized the resolution last month of diverting the COVID-19 hospital knowledge collection from CDC to a company.
The signatories of the scathing letter, dated July 31 and published Wednesday through The New York Times, come with current and former members of the Advisory Committee on Health Care Infection Control Practices (HICPAC).
“We are incredibly involved with this replacement in COVID-19 reports,” the fitness experts said. “The removal of the NHSN COVID-19 tracking formula will have serious implications for knowledge integrity.”
HICPAC advises the CDC Division, known as the Health Care Quality Promotion Division, which conducts a national hospital survey called the National Health Care Safety Network (NHSN). The NHSN was the initial destination for COVID-19 knowledge of hospitals until last month.
In mid-July, with a few days’ notice, management asked hospitals to avoid submitting their knowledge of COVID-19 to the CDC’s NHSN formula and sending it to TeleTracking, a Pittsburgh-based personal provider that had obtained a $10 million contract. Department of Health and Human Services a few months earlier.
The CDC testified its director Robert Redfield, unaware of the replacement until he did so through the director of fitness and social services, Alex Azar.
Sudden replacement has led to chaos at the state and local level, with some states wasting days of knowledge hospitalization of COVID-19 and the federal government publishing knowledge for weeks at a time.
A HHS spokesperson told the TPM that sudden replacement is mandatory because “we urgently needed express knowledge to allocate the reinfected [antiviral drug] for this week,” however, other management spokesmen said that the CDC could not respond more broadly to management’s COVID. -19 knowledge collection needs.
The signatories of the letters, the Times noted, are the two co-chairs of HICPAC, whom Azar had reapevered for office.
After the sudden replacement in CDC MANAGEMENT, they wrote, “Hospitals are now suffering from how to meet the daily reporting needs at DHHS.”
“In the future,” they added, “it will be even more complicated to make meaningful interstate comparisons and what COVID-19 mitigation methods have been successful (or failed)”.
Writing that they were “concerned” about hijacking COVID-19’s knowledge of CDC DHQP experts, the letter’s signatories stated that the United States “cannot lose its decades of experience in interpreting and analyzing critical knowledge to expand public health interventions.”