On official HHS podcast, department spokesperson Michael Caputo attacked COVID-19 mitigation efforts
Update: Caputo will take a leave of absence until after the election
Written by Madeline Peltz
Published
Updated
Update (9/16/20 1:40 p.m.): Following comments reported by The New York Times in which Caputo accused CDC scientists of “sedition” against President Trump, CBS' Steven Portnoy reports Caputo “has decided to take a leave of absence” for 60 days.
On an official Department of Health and Human Services podcast titled The Learning Curve, HHS spokesperson and far-right personality Michael Caputo attacked his own department’s recommended policies to stop the spread of the novel coronavirus, downplayed the threat of the virus spreading in schools, and blamed the media for the pandemic.
Caputo has recently come under fire for suppressing public health information from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, suggesting there will be an “armed revolt” if Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden wins the election, and praising white supremacists and promoting COVID-19 conspiracy theories on his own now-defunct podcast.
In a September 8 conversation with Dr. Elinore McCance-Katz, the assistant secretary for mental health and substance use at HHS, both Caputo and his guest attacked the idea of continuing mitigation efforts to stop the spread of the coronavirus. McCance-Katz was appointed to the newly created position by President Donald Trump in 2017, and her opposition to continuing lockdowns has been reported multiple times in the press.
She explicitly repeated these views on the podcast with Caputo, downplaying COVID-19 “which in most people, by the way, is a mild to asymptomatic disease if you are below ages 45 and younger” and claiming that “the people who make these decisions” about mitigation efforts -- including her colleagues at HHS -- are “taking away anything that makes people happy” and are guided in their recommendations by being “fairly affluent.” Caputo agreed, saying that officials are taking “even human contact” away from people.
Caputo and McCance-Katz attack the federal government's response to coronavirus
Citation From the September 8, 2020, edition of the Department of Health and Human Services' The Learning Curve podcast:
MICHAEL CAPUTO (HHS SPOKESPERSON): We could be putting people in danger and we are, aren’t we?
DR. ELINORE MCCANCE-KATZ (HHS ASSISTANT SECRETARY FOR MENTAL HEALTH AND SUBSTANCE ABUSE): We are, and I’ll just take it even further.
CAPUTO: Please don’t.
MCCANCE-KATZ: Well, you know, the people who make these decisions, the people who say “safer at home, stay at home,” tend to be people who are fairly affluent. Yeah, it probably is safer at home for them. They go to some nice house, some big house with all the amenities.
CAPUTO: Oh, they go to the shore.
MCCANCE-KATZ: Yes, they may have other homes they go to to get that additional isolation and protection. But the majority of Americans, they can’t do that.
…
When the president agreed to this back in March, it went on for six weeks and then it was supposed to stop. What was the American people told? The American people were told this was to reduce the spread, stop the spread, and give us time to get our hospitals ready to get treatments in place, to make sure --
CAPUTO: Right, to make sure we weren't overwhelmed.
MCCANCE-KATZ: Exactly, to make sure we weren’t overwhelmed. There was never any discussion of getting the virus down to some absurdly low level for what is a very contagious infectious disease -- which in most people, by the way, is a mild to asymptomatic disease if you are below ages 45 and younger. There was no agreement to this to this nonstop restriction and quarantining and isolation and taking away anything that makes people happy. You can’t go to a movie.
CAPUTO: Even human contact.
MCCANCE-KATZ: Yeah, you can't go to a movie, you can't go to a football game.
CAPUTO: The things that low and -- you know, the people who are on the lower strata of our economic system do, you know, because the wealthy people with the house on the beach, they're watching Netflix.
MCCANCE-KATZ: Yes
CAPUTO: And every other streaming platform, whereas people who are in Queens and have to go to work at the hospital or at the construction site because they're essential workers, they don't have access to these subscription services.
…
MCCANCE-KATZ: I’m going to say it: We shut down the entire country before the virus, in my opinion, had a chance to get around the entire country. Why? Because 24/7, we were seeing these horrible pictures of hospital emergency rooms and hospitals being overrun in New York and New Jersey. We were hearing what was going on in Washington. We heard these things, and of course we reacted to that and decisions were made. But when that’s over and you’ve kind of destroyed people’s -- you’ve taken the floor out from so many people because now they don’t have jobs, they have no source of income, they’re in risk of losing their homes, they’re in risk of losing their apartments
CAPUTO: Or they already have.
MCCANCE-KATZ: Or they already have. They can’t get medical care. This is -- We used a sledge hammer when I think we needed a scalpel.
CAPUTO: No doubt.
Later in the interview, McCance-Katz said that “for the great, great majority of children, this is not a serious illness” and questioned “this nonsense that somehow it’s unsafe to return to school.” Caputo replied that closing schools because of the coronavirus is “political.”
Caputo also asked: “What are parents supposed to do to save their children” from mitigation efforts “that have nothing to do with the virus?”
Caputo claimed the media doesn’t “give a damn about public health information” on the coronavirus and is “causing terrible, terrible impacts,” and said the media “have no interest” in a vaccine or treatments for COVID.”