A former EPA official says Vice President Dick Cheney’s office pushed for major deletions last October in congressional testimony on the public health consequences of climate change.

Jason Burnett, who resigned last month as a senior adviser to the EPA administrator, says in a letter to Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., that Cheney’s office worried that linking climate to public health problems might make it harder to avoid regulating greenhouse gases. The letter was obtained Tuesday by The Associated Press.

The White house deleted six of 14 pages of testimony the head of the Centers for Disease Control was to give before Boxer’s committee. At the time, the White House said it made the cuts because science advisers questioned the science.