House committee: Trump administration prioritized politics over science in COVID-19 response
The House committee investigating the government's response to COVID-19 says the Trump administration undermined the nation’s ability to respond effectively to the COVID-19 pandemic.
In a new report, the House Select Subcommittee on COVID-19 said the administration was “responsible for a series of critical failures that undermined the nation’s ability to respond effectively to the coronavirus pandemic.”
It claims the administration prioritized politics over science in its response to the pandemic.
“The Trump Administration’s apparent disregard of clear, urgent warnings about the looming coronavirus crisis significantly impaired the country’s ability to procure needed resources, equipment, and supplies and contributed to the countless American lives lost,” the report said.
The CDC confirmed the first case of coronavirus in the United States on Jan. 21, 2020. Later that month, the Trump administration declared the coronavirus outbreak to be a public health emergency.
The U.S. has now recorded more than 50 million confirmed COVID-19 cases and earlier this week hit 800,000 deaths.
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Officials from the Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told the House that the Trump administration often blocked the CDC’s requests to conduct public briefings for more than three months in early 2020. The stonewalling began after a briefing in late February 2020, where Nancy Messonnier, then-director of the CDC National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, warned the country about coronavirus.
Messonnier said the briefing “angered” Trump, and she received additional upsetting calls from other officials. Requests for a briefing to provide updates on the pandemic and new CDC mask recommendations in April 2020 were denied. Multiple CDC officials said media interview requests also were denied during this time, according to the report.
Anne Schuchat, former principal deputy director of the CDC, told the subcommittee the CDC felt muzzled by the Trump administration, which she said made decisions based on politics instead of science.
One CDC official told the subcommittee then-CDC Director Robert Redfield directed her to destroy evidence of political interference by a Trump Administration political appointee. The subcommittee also said the Trump administration “neglected the pandemic response to focus on the 2020 Election and the Big Lie.”
The Big Lie refers to the baseless claim by former President Donald Trump that there was widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election, causing him to lose the presidency.
The Trump administration also tried to weaken CDC guidelines for religious communities despite officials advising against it, according to the report. Jay Butler, a senior CDC official, said “what had been done [by the Trump White House] was not good public health practice."
The report also saidTrump’s political appointees pressured the Food and Drug Administration to authorize ineffective coronavirus treatments such as hydroxychloroquine and convalescent plasma despite objections from scientists.
Other dangerous strategies deployed by the Trump administration include its promotion of herd immunity without vaccines. Deborah Birx, former White House coronavirus response coordinator, said then-HHS political appointee Paul Alexander called for most people inside the White House to “be allowed and actually encouraged to get the virus and spread the virus.”
Birx said people promoting herd immunity were “a fringe group without grounding in epidemics, public health or on the ground common sense experience.”
Failure to address supply chain shortages
The House subcommittee found the Trump administration “failed to implement a national strategy to combat the pandemic and alleviate critical supply shortages, putting American lives at greater risk.”
Birx said no one from the federal government had contacted the country’s largest diagnostic companies until she arrived at the White House in early March 2020, after a public health emergency was already declared in the U.S.
Documents released by the subcommittee showed White House officials pushed federal agencies to issue hundreds of millions of dollars to companies without adequate authority and research. For example, Steven Hatfill, an adviser to then-White House Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy Director Peter Navarro, declined to purchase supplies like N95 masks in the spring of 2020 solely because they were not produced in the U.S. The subcommittee reports “these refusals may have further exacerbated shortages of lifesaving PPE.”