1/24/21: The dust has barely settled at
the White House, with the Trump folks moving out and the Biden folks moving in,
but at least one member of Team Trump is kicking dirt on the boss’s legacy.
____________________
“That was the place where people would let me say what needed
to be said about the pandemic, both in private with the governors and then in
following up, doing press to talk to the people of that state.”
Dr. Deborah Birx
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Dr. Deborah Birx, once a key member of the White House
Coronavirus Task Force, was asked if she had ever considered leaving the team. “Always,” she remarked,
without hesitation.
“I saw the president presenting graphs that I never made,” Birx explained. “So, I know that someone – or someone out
there or someone inside was creating a parallel set of data and graphics that
were shown to the president.”
Birx said she wrote 310 detailed daily reports, but didn’t
know if her boss read them. “I had very little exposure to President
Trump,” she said. “There was no team, full-time working in the White House on
coronavirus.” So she had to recruit her own help. Birx, a former colonel in the
U.S. Army, had 41 years’ service in government and called on people she knew
from previous work.
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President Trump said he liked Dr. Birx's scarves. |
Appearing on Face the Nation, Dr. Birx told host
Margaret Brennan that she believed her science-based guidance had been censored
by the White House. Birx said she was eventually blocked from appearing on the
news. Instead, she went out on the road, to speak to state and local healthcare
providers. “That was the place where people would let me say what needed to be
said about the pandemic, both in private with the governors and then in
following up, doing press to talk to the people of that state.”
Asked if she believed the Trump administration suppressed vital information on the pandemic to win
the election, Dr. Birx responded: “I don’t know what their motivation was.
I know that I was so frustrated that I realized that the only way –
that if I could not get a voice internally, that I could get a
voice out at the state level.”
Were Trump’s comments about the “hoax” harmful?
“When you have a pandemic when you’re relying on
every American to change their behavior, communication
is absolutely key,” Birx replied. “And so every time a statement
was made by a political leader that wasn’t consistent
with public health needs, that derailed our response.”
*
IN AN INTERVIEW published in The New York Times today,
Dr. Fauci went into even more detail in describing what it was like to work in
the Trump White House.
Excerpts follow:
I would try to express the
gravity of the situation, and the response of the president was always leaning
toward, “Well, it’s not that bad, right?” And I would say, “Yes, it is that
bad.” It was almost a reflex response, trying to coax you to minimize it. Not
saying, “I want you to minimize it,” but, “Oh, really, was it that bad?”
That much might be expected, with any president wanting to
put the best face on a problem, and convince the American people that the
crisis was in hand. Trump was different than any of the other seven presidents Fauci
had worked for. As this blogger might put it, he was incredibly ill-informed.
Fauci explained:
And the other thing that made me
really concerned was, it was clear that he was getting input from people who
were calling him up, I don’t know who, people he knew from business, saying,
“Hey, I heard about this drug, isn’t it great?” or, “Boy, this convalescent
plasma is really phenomenal.” And I would try to, you know, calmly explain that
you find out if something works by doing an appropriate clinical trial; you get
the information, you give it a peer review. And he’d say, “Oh, no, no, no, no,
no, no, no, this stuff really works.”
He would take just as seriously
their opinion — based on no data, just anecdote — that something might really
be important. It wasn’t just hydroxychloroquine; it was a variety of alternative-medicine-type
approaches. It was always, “A guy called me up, a friend of mine from blah,
blah, blah.” That’s when my anxiety started to escalate.
Even worse, the president surrounded himself “with people
saying things that didn’t make any scientific sense.”
Eventually, White House aides, if not the president himself,
began to see Dr. Fauci as the problem, not so much the virus. He didn’t like
contradicting the president. “But I made a decision that I just had to.
Otherwise I would be compromising my own integrity, and be giving a false
message to the world. If I didn’t speak up, it would be almost tacit
approval that what he was saying was OK.”
White House aides soon turned to “nefarious” methods to try
to damage his reputation, he said.
After that, Trump brought in Dr. Scott Atlas, a heart
surgeon, to give him advice. Atlas and Fauci clashed repeatedly. Fauci was
asked, did this make his job worse? No, he replied, his “day job” was still
director of N.I.A.I.D. He did not have to go to the White House every day. He felt
bad for one colleague, who did. “Debbie Birx had to live with this person [Atlas]
in the White House every day,” he said, “so it was much more of a painful
situation for her.”
Still, he never really considered quitting the Task Force.
When people just see you
standing up there, they sometimes think you’re being complicit in the
distortions emanating from the stage. But I felt that if I stepped down,
that would leave a void. Someone’s got to not be afraid to speak out the truth.
They would try to play down real problems and have a little happy talk about
how things are OK. And I would always say, “Wait a minute, hold it folks, this
is serious business.” So there was a joke — a friendly joke, you know — that I was
the skunk at the picnic.
He and his wife discussed his leaving his post, but
ultimately agreed, “If I did walk away, the skunk at the picnic would no longer
be at the picnic.” It was better to remain. If he couldn’t change any minds, the
least he could try to do was make others realize “that nonsense could not be
spouted” without his pushing back.
“I think in the big picture, I felt it would be better for
the country and better for the cause for me to stay, as opposed to walk away.”
POSTSCRIPT: Dr. Robert Redfield, head of
the Centers for Disease Control during the Trump administration, was also asked
what his “greatest disappointment” was in not being able to
better mitigate the spread of COVID-19.
“My greatest disappointment was the lack of consistency of
public health messaging and the inconsistency of civic leaders to reinforce the
public health message.” (You can read between the lines what that means – “civic leaders.”)
Dr. Redfield continued, “I’m very disappointed that some civic leaders
decided to make this issue of mitigation a political football, rather than
embracing the public health measures.”
You
know. Like, mask-wearing.
Certain
“civic leaders” seemed to think masks were an abomination. Redfield was asked
how he had been traveling, back and forth between Washington D.C. and Atlanta
during this period. “You know,” he told a reporter, “I believe if I wear my
mask, wash my hands and social distance, I can fly safely.”
Simple
message. Who would disagree with that?
Certain
“civic leaders.”
