HHS had told hospitals to stop reporting data on coronavirus hospitalizations to CDC, saying the agency was releasing the information too slowly. HHS, CDC’s chief department, said it would manage the information instead.
The CDC removed some of the data from its website on Wednesday night.
On Thursday morning, HHS said it was ordering the agency to re-save the data.
“HHS is committed to being transparent to the American public about the information it is collecting about the coronavirus. Therefore, HHS has ordered CDC to reinstate the coronavirus dashboards it removed from the public on Wednesday,” Michael Caputo, undersecretary of public affairs. he said Thursday.
“In the future, HHS and CDC will offer more powerful information about the coronavirus, powered by HHS Protect,” said Caputo. HHS Protect is the department’s coronavirus information center.
The White House has been asking hospitals to provide coronavirus data daily since March.
The dashboard modules were restored Thursday. CDC also added language to its website saying the data will not be updated after July 14.
Public health experts had vociferously opposed HHS’s decision to avoid CDC.
“Given how political the response has been to date, it is a step back to have this data directly at HHS in Washington,” former CDC acting director Dr. Richard Besser told CNN.
“The disruption they are going to create, and the confusion just telling people to do something different in the midst of a disaster, that doesn’t work,” executive director of the United States Public Health Association, Dr. Georges, told CNN Benjamin.
“It’s like saying to a soldier in the middle of a battle, ‘We want you to fight differently than we train you.’ It doesn’t work.”
The Infectious Diseases Society of America called the decision “troubling.”
White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany later denied that HHS planned to remove data from the CDC website.
“No one is taking away CDC access or data and that data is routinely released so that the American people are fully informed,” he told reporters on Thursday. “The CDC database is the public information that has been available. It will continue to be public. It should be public.”
CNN’s Maggie Fox, Michael Nedelman and Naomi Thomas contributed to this report.
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