'Yippee': Emails reveal how Trump officials celebrated getting CDC to change official language on Covid risks

Recently unearthed emails show members of the Trump administration taking victory laps after they successfully managed to convince the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention to downplay the severity of the coronavirus.

According to The Washington Post, Donald Trump's science adviser, Paul Alexander, emailed then Department of Health and Human Services' public affairs chief Michael Caputo, and bragged that he had caused the CDC to change a line about how the virus spreads amongst younger people.

In the email, Mr Alexander called it a "small victory but a victory nonetheless, yippee!!!"

Later in the report, Mr Alexander tells Mr Caputo that he and Dr Scott Atlas - a doctor with no background in infectious disease or epidemiology that Mr Trump used as the public face of the White House's coronavirus taskforce - successfully pressured the CDC to alter a weekly report discussing virus deaths among young Americans.