Further, several interviews described efforts by the administration to alter or influence the agency’s guidance and weekly scientific reports, the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, which typically are not shared outside the agency before they’re published.

It took “great effort to protect that integrity,” Schuchat said in the transcribed excerpt, and “active effort” on the part of CDC officials “to make sure that the attempts were not successful” to alter the reports.

In another interview, Dr. Christine Casey, an editor of CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, described an email from Trump appointee and former US Health and Human Services adviser Paul Alexander that she saw as a request to stop a report. She called it “highly unusual and quite concerning for somebody to ask to put an immediate stop on MMWR reports. I don’t think in my memory that has ever happened. And, to be accused — because it is accusatory language — that MMWR content is designed to harm our commander in chief, the President.”