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Whistleblower: HHS Staff Who Met Coronavirus Evacuees Had No Training Or Protection

A government whistleblower has alleged that federal health employees who interacted with Americans quarantined for potential exposure to coronavirus were not wearing protective gear or given proper medical training, according to several media reports on Thursday.

Officials from the Department of Health and Human Services sent more than a dozen ill-equipped workers to California earlier this month to receive the Americans evacuated from Wuhan, China, according to the whistleblower’s 24-page complaint filed Wednesday and obtained first by The Washington Post and later by The New York Timesand The Wall Street Journal.

According to the reports, the complaint alleges that HHS employees were “improperly deployed” and “not properly trained or equipped to operate in a public health emergency situation.” The whistleblower also said that some workers were potentially exposed to coronavirus because they were not trained in wearing protective equipment — despite having face-to-face contact with passengers returning from Wuhan, where the outbreak originated.

The workers did not show symptoms of infection and were not tested or quarantined for the virus, COVID-19, before flying home from the March Air Reserve Base and Travis Air Force Base, lawyers for the whistleblower told the Post. The whistleblower is reportedly a senior HHS official who oversees workers at the Administration for Children and Families, a unit within the agency. The workers who were allegedly exposed to the outbreak came from the whistleblower’s unit.

In her complaint, the whistleblower wrote that she received “panicked calls” from “deployed staff members expressing concerns with the lack of HHS communication and coordination.” They also told her about “being sent into quarantined areas without personal protective equipment, training or experience in managing public health emergencies” and worried that they would pose a “potential danger to both themselves and members...

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