Pardon us for being skeptical about the Trump administration’s motives for ordering hospitals last week to bypass the Centers for Disease Control and send all COVID-19 patient information to the Health and Human Services database.

One thing is clear. The effort was botched from the outset, leaving hospital administrators, researchers and health officials who rely on the data unable to do the work that is crucial to fighting the pandemic.

Unlike the CDC’s system, the HHS database is not open to the public. President Trump has repeatedly tried — and failed — to downplay the virus for political purposes. If, as top health experts fear, the Trump administration made the switch to hide politically damaging COVID-19 data from the public, it constitutes an unacceptable outrage. Congress should take immediate action to make the information fully transparent.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, hospitals have been providing daily data on the availability of hospital beds, ventilators, personal protective equipment and the number of COVID-19 patients admitted. The information enables researchers to model the spread of the virus and helps hospitals and government agencies plan for acquiring adequate supplies.

Dr. Grace Lee, a pediatric infectious disease physician and associate chief medical officer at Stanford’s Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital, told NPR that the CDC system has been working well.

“I’m very surprised that we are being mandated to report into a parallel system when hospitals have gotten used to reporting into NHSN (the collection network run by the CDC). It’s adding burden at a time when hospitals again are now responding to the surge of COVID-19,” she said. “The timing couldn’t be worse, to be honest.”

But Dr. Deborah Birx, who heads the White House’s coronavirus task force, said that she was frustrated by the lag time of CDC reports and called the switch “a sincere effort to streamline and improve data collection.”

It’s too early to determine the success of the new tracking system. But it’s clear that Birx bungled in not telling hospitals in advance that the switch was under consideration. The New York Times reported, for example, that the new system will still require that hospitals enter the data manually, an absurd approach in today’s electronic world. Nor were researchers, health officials or hospitals consulted about how — or even if — the data could be accessed. A private health data firm in Pittsburgh, Pa., will manage the information.

For decades, under Democratic and Republican administrations, the CDC was one of the most trusted federal government agencies. A 2019 Pew Research Center survey revealed that it had an 80% favorability rating, ranking only behind the U.S. Postal Service (90%), the National Park Service (86%) and NASA (81%).

The CDC’s reputation has fallen considerably this year, beginning with its failure to mass produce successful test kits in February. But the nation needs a strong, independent federal agency that protects Americans from health threats. The Trump administration must stop undermining the CDC and make all COVID-19 data available to the public.