A dog breeder was tapped to lead US pandemic task force.
On Jan 21, the day the first US case of coronavirus was reported, the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services appeared on Fox News to report the latest on the disease as it ravaged China. Alex Azar , a 52-year-old lawyer and former drug industry executive, assured Americans the US government was prepared.
As is now widely known, two agencies Azar oversaw as HHS secretary, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration, wouldn’t come up with viable tests for five and half weeks, even as other countries and the World Health Organization had already prepared their own.
The first test created by the CDC, meant to be used by other labs, was plagued by a glitch that rendered it useless and wasn’t fixed for weeks. It wasn’t until March that tests by other labs went into production. The lack of tests “limited hospitals’ ability to monitor the health of patients and staff,” the HHS Inspector General said in a report this month. The equipment shortage “put staff and patients at risk.
HHS declined to make Azar available for an interview. Michael Caputo, the new chief HHS spokesman, declined to answerquestions about Azar’s stewardship, saying in a statement: “We are communicating to the American public during a deadly pandemic.”Azar is a Republican lawyer who once clerked for the late conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and counts current Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh as a friend.
Before joining the Trump Administration in January 2018, Harrison’s official HHS biography says, he “ran a small business in Texas.” The biography does not disclose the name or nature of that business, but his personal financial disclosure forms show that from 2012 until 2018 he ran a company called Dallas Labradoodles.
Harrison decided, the sources say, to exclude FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn from the task force. “He said he didn’t need to be included,” said one official with knowledge of the matter. Fauci, who has become a public face of the Trump Administration’s Covid-19 effort, said he wasn’t sure including the FDA was necessary at the start. Initially, the Chinese government was saying the virus spread through animals, not human to human, he said. “You would include the FDA when you want to expedite drugs or devices,” Fauci said.
The next week, on Feb 7, in another press conference, Azar repeated the message. “The immediate risk to the American public is low at this time,” he announced. Meanwhile, Azar continued to say “the immediate risk” to Americans was low and that travel restrictions had worked. “So I think so far, our measures have been quite effective,” he told NPR on Feb 14.
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