On May 21, 2020, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sent the White House its draft of planned guidance for religious communities and expected to receive approval before publishing it.
However, the Trump administration ignored the CDC's recommendation for religious services to be moved from in-person to virtual, according to recently released emails by a House select subcommittee on the coronavirus crisis, per The Washington Post.
The emails included a conversation between Kellyanne Conway, a top adviser to Former President Donald Trump, and Paul Ray, then-administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.
"The new CDC draft includes a significant amount of new content, much of which seems to raise religious liberty concerns. In the attached, I have proposed several passages for deletion to address those concerns," Ray wrote, per The Guardian.
"If these edits are acceptable to you all, we could tell CDC, as early in the morning as possible, that they are free to publish contingent on striking the offensive passages."
Conway replied to Ray, thanking him for "holding firm against this newest round of mission creep."
In a separate email thread, May Davis Mailman, a White House lawyer, suggested other edits to the CDC guidance.
"This removes all the tele-church suggestions, though personally I will say that if I was old and vulnerable (I do feel old and vulnerable), drive through services would sound welcome," Mailman said.
In a statement released by the House select subcommittee on the coronavirus crisis, Chairman Rep. James E. Clyburn said that the Trump administration "prioritized politics over public health."
"The Select Subcommittee continues to unearth disturbing new details on how the Trump Administration’s pandemic response prioritized politics over public health," Clyburn said. "While a Trump White House official admitted to her colleagues that proposed CDC guidelines for places of worship were reasonable, she worked with them to strong-arm changes to those guidelines that deprived Americans of useful information on how to protect themselves against this deadly virus.
"As today’s new evidence also makes clear, Trump White House officials worked under the direction of the former president to purposefully undercut public health officials' recommendations and muzzle their ability to communicate clearly to the American public. I welcome the testimony from GAO officials and experts today as we work to support and build on the Biden Administration’s efforts to ensure scientific integrity at our nation’s public health agencies."
At the time of the emails, COVID-19 cases were continuing to rise and there were numbers of churches throughout the United States that saw new cases reported after services. Jay Butler, a senior CDC official, expressed the CDC's concern at the time what editing their guidance would do in regards to new cases.
"I must admit, as someone who has been speaking with churches and pastors on this (and as someone who goes to church), I am not sure [I] see a public health reason to take down and replace" the original guidance, Butler said in an email on May 23, 2020.
"This is not good public health — I am very troubled on this Sunday morning that there will be people who will get sick and perhaps die because of what we were forced to do," Butler said in another email the next day.
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