The White House’s inability to track the disease as it spread across the nation crippled the government’s response and led to the worst disaster this country has faced in nearly a century
This reassurance came at precisely, and tragically, the wrong time. With a different answer, much of the human devastation that was about to unfold in the United States would have been avoidable. Academic research from Imperial College in London, modeling the U.S. response, estimates that up to 90 percent ofdeaths could have been prevented had the U.S. moved to shut down by March 2nd.
The government leaders who failed to safeguard the nation are CDC Director Redfield; FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn; Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar; and of course, President Trump. Together, these men had the power to change the direction of this pandemic, to lessen its impact on the economy, and constrain the death toll from COVID-19.
To the horror of public-health experts, America remains rudderless in the crisis. Obama’s CDC director, Tom Frieden, says “you can look back with 20/20 hindsight on lots of things.” But even months into the response — and despite Vice President Mike Pence nominally at the helm of the Coronavirus Task Force — Frieden says he can’t discern who is actually in charge of the federal response, “and that’s dangerous.
Still, Redfield’s résumé — religious-right bona fides, a military background, and a knack for ingratiating himself with powerful people — primed his return to government. “Over the years, there have been several attempts to push him into powerful slots within Republican administrations,” says Garrett. “I don’t think most of his promoters have ever been particularly interested in the science.
The Trump administration had also hollowed out the CDC’s China presence, slashing staff from 47 to barely a dozen. These cuts were part of a broad-reaching drawdown of America’s disease preparedness, including Trump’s decision to disband the National Security Counsel’s pandemic-response team. In late 2018, Azar’s HHS rejected a proposal, solicited by the Obama administration, to buy a machine capable of churning out 1.5 million N95 respirators a day, for use in a pandemic.
Hailing from the establishment wing of the GOP, Azar didn’t have much juice with Trump. He did not reach the president to discuss the outbreak until January 18th. Another 10 days would pass before the White House created a Coronavirus Task Force, with Azar at the helm. Two days later, Azar declared a public-health emergency.
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks with FDA Commissioner Dr. Stephen Hahn during the daily coronavirus disease task force briefing at the White House in Washington, U.S., April 19, 2020.FDA officials would not speak on the record, but in extended background interviews, they defended the FDA’s role in regulating lab tests as both righteous and desirable.
Scott Becker is the executive director of the Association of Public Health Laboratories, the umbrella group that represents these labs and helps them interface with the CDC. On the morning of February 8th, a Saturday, his cellphone began blowing up with messages from member labs. “I started to see this string of the problems, and I thought, ‘Oh, my God, this can’t be happening,’” Becker says.
But Azar proved equally hapless at managing down. Instead of engineering a workaround to the unreliable CDC test, or leaning on his private-sector connections to jump-start commercial testing, Azar insisted that the original kit be fixed. He reportedly rejected use of the WHO test, out of concern that the test was unreliable.
The crisis dragged on for weeks. Publicly, the CDC put on a brave face. “We’re fully stood up at CDC,” Dr. Nancy Messonnier, the director of the National Center of Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, said on February 21st. “There is no lag time for testing.” Messonnier continued to point to false positives as the major threat: “We obviously would not want to use anything but the most perfect possible kits.
Yet this sense of alarm was not reflected at the top. In Senate testimony on February 25th, Azar insisted the administration was delivering. “I’m told the diagnostic doesn’t work,” Sen. Murray said, challenging Azar. The HHS secretary shot back. “That’s simply, flatly incorrect,” he said, pointing to the CDC’s own ability to run the test. Azar then began spouting Trumpian self-praise, celebrating the “historic” response to the virus.
Trump soon announced a major change of course. Pence would be taking over the task force, sidelining Azar. Trump himself minimized the threat of the disease, calling coronavirus “a flu,” and insisted that infections had peaked: “We have a total of 15 people” diagnosed with COVID-19, he said. “The 15, within a couple of days, is going to be down to close to zero.”
The testing breakdown had left the nation blind to the true scope of the outbreak. By March 1st, the CDC’s official tally of coronavirus cases had spiked from the 15 cases touted by Trump to 75. But researchers at Northeastern University have now developed models showing there were likely 28,000 infections at the time, in just five major cities, including New York and Seattle.
Those comments hit Sebelius like a punch in the gut. Trump plainly saw effective testing as a threat to his political messaging that the administration was containing the virus. By standing at CDC headquarters to declare that the tests were “perfect” and that he didn’t want COVID-19 numbers going up, the president was doing the exact opposite of demanding a fix. For the president’s deputies, Sebelius says, “there couldn’t be a clearer signal.
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