Attorney Scott Pilutik wrestles with the news of the day, from a lawyerly perspective…
So a Health and Human Services (the CDC’s parent agency) official raised a concern about that agency’s handling of the return of Americans returning from Wuhan China, specifically that those officials — all non-medical professionals — were ordered to to receive the evacuees without protective gear, ordered to enter quarantined areas where the evacuees were present, and then weren’t ever tested for the virus. One of those staff members stayed at a nearby hotel and left California on a commercial flight.
So it’s probably not a coincidence that the first American case of “unknown origin” appeared a week later near Travis Air Force Base, where the evacuees arrived.
As a reward for bringing this to the attention of the Office of the Special Counsel, the anonymous official was retaliated against and reassigned, and told she’d be fired if she didn’t accept the reassignment.
The White House is treating all of this as a public relations problem to micromanage instead of a public health crisis to address professionally. Only a few days ago Mike Pompeo said:
“Had China permitted its own and foreign journalists and medical personnel to speak and investigate freely, Chinese officials and other nations would have been far better prepared to address the challenge.”
Then we decided that Pompeo’s warning was actually a game plan.
