Report Details Trump Administration Efforts to Undermine Politically Motivated Fight Against Covid-19

December 17, 2021

Photo: Win McNamee / Getty Images

Administration officials of Donald Trump made “efforts deliberate to undermine the national response to coronavirus for political purposes, ”said the House of Representatives subcommittee on the coronavirus pandemic crisis , led by Democrats, in a report released Friday.

The committee, which spent months working to interviewing former Trump Administration officials, said his administration worked to undermine the public health response to the coronavirus pandemic, by preventing officials from speaking publicly, diluting the coronavirus testing guide, and attempting to interfere with other public health guidelines. related to the COVID pandemic – 19 in the country, according to CNN.

Many parts of the report are a summary of documents and interviews that were published throughout the last year, but the report also described new examples where health guidelines were adapted for political reasons, despite the concerns of the country’s health officials about the possible harmful effects of the changes.

NEW REPORT: @COVIDoversight just released a report detailing further evidence of former Trump officials’ dangerous pursuit of a ‘herd immunity’ strategy and interference in public health. Read it here: https://t.co/5lb6gwTEc8

— Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis (@COVIDOversight) December 17, 2021

In one case, the Dr. Jay Butler, deputy director of infectious diseases at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told the committee that the Trump White House directed him to provide “softened” guidance. ”To the faith and religious communities .

Butler wrote in an email about the change saying that he was “very concerned this Sunday morning that there will be people who will get sick and maybe die because of what we were forced to do” .

“I was doing a great examination of conscience on whether or not I should have accepted to make the change in the document”, said Butler to the committee when asked about his words. “Clearly, it was a directive, but it was a real fight, already that I felt that what had been done was not good public health practice. ”

Butler told the committee that, while it was not aware of no examples in which the guide had an adverse impact on the health of Americans, “that concern will haunt me for some time.”

The report also recounts deep frustration from the then White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator, Dr. Deborah Birx , who at one point was so upset by a meeting that included doctors she called part of a “fringe group” who told her colleagues that would not attend.

“I can’t be a part of this with these people who believe in herd immunity”, Birx wrote in an email posted by the committee. That approach has been widely criticized by public health experts, who point out that a previous infection does not guarantee immunity and who say such an approach would certainly have led to even more hospitalizations and deaths from the COVID pandemic – 19.

The report also described how a briefing so enraged former President Donald Trump that the Administration prevented CDC officials from holding public briefings on the pandemic for more than three months.

The then director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases of the CDC, the Dr. Nancy Messonnier, told the committee that Trump was “angry” after she gave a briefing on 25 February 2020, in which he warned about the danger of COVID – 19.

“Trump Administration officials participated in an astonishing pattern of political interference in the response to the pandemic and did not heed early warnings of the coming crisis,” said the committee in its summary.

“These decisions put countless American lives at risk, undermined the nation’s public health institutions, and contributed to one of the worst leadership failures in American history,” the committee noted.

The oversight committee investigated the efforts and actions of the administration officials n Trump for more than a year to compile the report, which also reflects that Trump’s efforts to combat the pandemic effectively disappeared after he lost the presidential election to Joe Biden.

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