A Kennedy who worked on Jared Kushner's COVID-19 task force said he was asked to distort a coronavirus prediction to make the outbreak seem less bad

https://news.yahoo.com/kennedy-worked-jared-kushners-covid-114617126.html

https://www.businessinsider.com/kennedy-says-kushner-virus-taskforce-asked-him-to-distort-predictions-2020-9

 Sinéad Baker

Sept. 22, 2020

Despite his political differences with its boss, a member of the Kennedy dynasty joined Jared Kushner's coronavirus task force as the pandemic began to ravage the US.

However, Max Kennedy Jr. said that his hopes for Kushner's team to rise above partisanship to do good were swiftly dashed and that at one point he was asked to distort a model of the COVID-19 pandemic to downplay its expected impact.

 
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Despite his political differences with its boss, a member of the Kennedy dynasty joined Jared Kushner's coronavirus task force as the pandemic began to ravage the US.

However, Max Kennedy Jr. said that his hopes for Kushner's team to rise above partisanship to do good were swiftly dashed and that at one point he was asked to distort a model of the COVID-19 pandemic to downplay its expected impact.

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He said the coronavirus team's volunteers had no relevant experience and were told to prioritize allies of President Donald Trump.

Describing one moment of political interference, Kennedy said he was asked to create a rival model of how many people the virus could kill, on the grounds that other predictions by experts were "too severe."

Kennedy said his instructions were to make a model predicting a high of 100,000 deaths in the US. As of Tuesday, about 200,000 Americans had died from the virus.

Kennedy said he was asked to do this by Brad Smith, one of the task force's directors. A spokesman for Smith told The New Yorker that Smith did not recall the conversation.

Kennedy said he declined to create the model, telling Smith that he didn't "know the first thing about disease modeling."

Kennedy also said he believes the Trump administration decided to rely on volunteers so it could bypass its own experts and "control the narrative."

He said the team — made up of mostly people in their 20s with backgrounds in finance — was small and ill-qualified for the task at hand.

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