Michael Fourdraine [email protected]

ALT But then something changed. A month later, on the afternoon of May 6, 2021, an email from the provincial health department began to circulate saying that all currently scheduled meetings would be “paused” until provincial researchers “had the time to delve more deeply into existing data.” Meetings that had been planned months in advance were wiped from the calendar. Field experts and neurologists were left waiting on Zoom links that never came. “There was a stop, suddenly, abruptly, with no apparent explanation,” says Marrero, who called the decision “unusual by any standards.” Things grew even murkier 10 days later, when Marrero says he got a call on his cellphone from Dr. Hanan Smadi, the province’s acting lead epidemiologist, telling him to stop reporting potential new cases to the provincial authorities. Marrero was appalled. He asked where the request was coming from and was told "it's coming from higher up."