Top health official accused of politicizing U.S. mental health agency

The head of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration is joining the chorus of voices from the White House calling for schools to reopen. “What is this nonsense that somehow it’s unsafe to return to school?” SAMHSA administrator Elinore McCance-Katz said unprompted in the middle of a podcast posted last week to the HHS website. Now, other current and former SAMHSA officials are concerned that with this stance on schools and other views that minimize the scale of the pandemic, McCance-Katz — a psychiatrist with a Ph.D. in infectious disease epidemiology — is politicizing the office and reinforcing the Trump administration's arguments about Covid-19 that aren't backed up by sound science. Read more in an exclusive new story here.