Trump's COVID Response Didn’t Make America Great Again
A year-end report from the House Select Committee on the Coronavirus Crisis documents the Trump administration’s deliberate efforts to undermine the nation's coronavirus response for political purposes,by weakening testing guidance and championing widespread "herd immunity."
The report paints a sad picture of how the administration worked to undermine the public health response to the coronavirus pandemic by blocking officials from speaking publicly, watering down testing guidance and attempting to interfere with other public health guidance.
Quotes in italics below, unless otherwise attributed, are from the Select Committee’s report.
Then-President Trump held a meeting at the White House with a “fringe group” that advocated for a dangerous herd immunity strategy embraced by then-White House Special Advisor Dr. Scott Atlas.
The Select Subcommittee obtained an email showing that then-President Trump was scheduled to hold a roundtable event at the White House in August 2020 with proponents of a dangerous herd immunity strategy, whom former White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx described as “a fringe group without grounding in epidemics, public health or on the ground common sense experience.” In an email to then-Chief of Staff to the Vice President Marc Short, Dr. Birx refused to be associated with the roundtable, telling Mr. Short that she could “go out of town or whatever gives the WH cover” on the day of the event.
FYI–Dr. Scott Atlas is one of KUSI News go-to “experts” on the pandemic.
Dr. Birx and former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Principal Deputy Director Dr. Anne Schuchat detailed a series of early missteps that contributed to the Trump Administration’s ineffectual coronavirus response.
In a transcribed interview before the Select Subcommittee, Dr. Birx revealed that federal officials had not contacted some of the largest diagnostic companies operating in the United States to help scale up testing until she arrived at the White House in March 2020—more than a month after the United States had declared a public health emergency in response to the coronavirus outbreak.
According to Dr. Schuchat, Trump Administration officials in February 2020 were so narrowly focused on repatriating Americans abroad that “key areas, like scaling up PPE [personal protective equipment] and getting our arms around the supply chain and protecting the healthcare system and so forth, it didn’t get sufficient attention” during the initial response. Dr. Schuchat emphasized that “a smoother, more effective leadership and policy environment would have been helpful” during the initial months of the response.
From CNN
Another example of weakened guidance in the report is from Birx, who confirmed to the committee that Dr. Scott Atlas, a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, was involved in changing testing guidance to advise against testing most asymptomatic people even if they were exposed to the virus -- something the report said that is contrary to science-based recommendations. Trump brought on Atlas to the coronavirus task force after seeing him appear on Fox…
…The committee wrote that Birx stated in her interview that changes made on testing guidance for people who were asymptomatic "were made specifically to reduce the amount of testing being conducted," the report said. Fewer tests served to "obscure how rapidly the virus was spreading across the country," it said.
There’s an impressive catalog of evidence, backed by transcriptions of interviews and documents provided to the committee.
Among the misdeeds documented are evidence of:
“Softened” CDC’s public health guidance for faith communities
Career scientists were "instructed to destroy evidence of political interference."
Fraud in pandemic programs administered by the previous Administration: nearly 97% of Economic Injury Disaster Loan (EIDL) fraud prosecutions involved fraudulent applications submitted during the Trump Administration’s implementation of the program.
Trump White House officials blocked CDC briefings and media appearances, and attempted to sidestep CDC in finalizing coronavirus guidance.
Trump White House officials neglected the pandemic response to focus on the 2020 presidential election an
One heading from the 46-page report reads: "The Trump Administration’s Persistent Political Interference in the Pandemic Response Contributed to One of the Worst Failures of Leadership in American History."
That says a lot. But it’s also important to realize that the administration’s squishy stances enabled the anti-vaxx / anti-mask movements. And this is ongoing.
***
Pregnant women constitute 40% of all coronavirus deaths since the emergence of the Delta variant.
Via Hunter at Daily Kos:
If someone tells you they are "pro-life," they are a liar. The term has become one used exclusively by sociopaths to justify claims that whatever tics are rolling around inside their own brains are so unfathomably important that abiding by them is worth killing others.
American conservatism has been erased and replaced with a fascist shudder that glorifies murder in all its forms. Use a gun to kill, become a new fascist hero.
Refuse to abide the safety measures meant to keep the country's "essential workers" a bit safer and the hospitals less overrun—you will be praised as a new fascist patriot.
Kill a pregnant would-be mother because you would not wear a mask while passing her in a supermarket aisle during a pandemic, and Republicans everywhere will celebrate how boldly you stuck to your own principles, no matter who else died because of it.
https://twitter.com/apollosearth/status/1403226764407717889?s=20
Hey folks! There’s a change coming to Words & Deeds in 2022. I’ll be moving from WordPress to Substack, which hopefully will mean just a few changes in formatting. Stay tuned for exciting details.
Email me at WritetoDougPorter@Gmail.com