Michael Caputo's out—for now. After the weekend exposure of emails showing that former Trump campaign operative turned Health and Human Services Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Michael Caputo used his office to attack, water down, and delay Centers of Disease Control and Prevention scientific reports on pandemic dangers, an HHS statement announced that Caputo will be taking a 60-day "leave of absence to focus on his health and the well-being of his family."
Caputo issued a private apology to HHS officials after releasing a conspiracy-laced Facebook video in which he claimed that CDC scientists releasing data at odds with Donald Trump's nonsensical and often-conflicting pandemic declarations were operating as a "resistance unit" intent on politically damaging Trump, while urging Trump supporters to "buy ammunition" to fend off a possible political coup by Democratic candidate Joe Biden.
Caputo claimed in his rant that his "mental health had definitely failed." His 60-day leave from HHS will, coincidentally, remove him from the public eye from now until shortly after the November elections. If Trump wins, expect Caputo’s policies to be implemented even more aggressively, throughout the department.
Caputo is not the only official to be leaving HHS, however. In the same HHS statement announcing Caputo's temporary leave, the department announced that Caputo aide Dr. Paul Alexander "was hired to engage with the department on a temporary basis" and will now "be leaving the department." Alexander was singled out as the Caputo assistant most prominently responsible for attempting to alter CDC scientific statements—while making bizarre and unfounded claims that children face "essentially zero" risk from COVID-19 and blasting the agency's documentation of risks to American schoolchildren and university students as "hit pieces" meant to damage the Trump administration.
None of this is assurance that Trump's installed political hires will be backing down in their attempts to block the CDC from releasing accurate information about pandemic risks or their claims that agency scientists who release information at odds with Trump's own words are doing so not to save lives, but to damage Republicanism. It only means that the administration is cutting Caputo loose, temporarily, in an attempt to dodge these revelations of just how often his team attempted to alter agency science to hide the true dangers of Trump's "reopening" plans.
Reopening plans that rely on, in Trump's newest explanations, America developing a "herd mentality."
