The White House denies any coverup and the agencies involved say they still got their message across.
Jason Burnett, 31, who resigned last month as the Environmental Protection Agency's associate deputy administrator, refused to name who forced the deletion of health concerns.
The testimony was part of an October Senate hearing on the impact of global warming.
Before the hearing, Cheney's office and the White House's Council on Environmental Quality wanted "any discussions of the human health consequences of climate change" deleted, said Burnett, a Democrat who supports Barack Obama, speaking at a news conference.
A White House spokeswoman explained in fall — when the changes were first revealed — that the edits were meant to make it consistent with a report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a United Nations-sponsored consortium of scientists who examined global warming.
But some of the passages deleted from the testimony of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Julie Gerberding included health risks — hazards of poor air quality, for instance — that are in the IPCC report, said Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., chairwoman of the Environment and Public Works Committee.
Boxer called it "a coverup being directed from the White House and the office of the vice president."
White House spokesman Tony Fratto called her claim "absurd" and said Cheney's office weighed in as a matter of routine amid "conflicting views of scientists."
CDC spokesman Tom Skinner said Gerberding conveyed her message to the committee in October despite the changes.
"Any edits that were made to the written testimony were made during the routine editing process," he said in an e-mail.
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