A congressional report released Friday concludes that the Trump administration deliberately tried to undermine the U.S. response to the coronaviruses for political purposes.
The report, prepared by the House Select Subcommittee on the nation s Covid response, says the White House repeatedly overruled public health and testing guidance by the nation's top infectious disease experts and silenced officials in order to promote President Donald Trump's political agenda.
In August of last year, for example, Trump hosted a White House meeting with people who promoted a herd immunity strategy pushed by White House special adviser Dr. Scott Atlas. The subcommittee received an email sent ahead of the meeting in which Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House Covid response coordinator, told the Vice President's chief of staff, Marc Short, that it was a fringe group without a background in epidemics, public health or on the ground common sense experience. Birx said in the email that she could go out of town or whatever gives the WH cover on the day of the meeting.
A few months later in October, National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Francis Collins called for a quick and devastating take down of the herd immunity strategy, according to emails obtained and released by the subcommittee.
Birx said when she arrived in the White House in March 2020 - more than a month after the U.S. declared a public health emergency - she learned that federal officials had not yet contacted some of the largest U.S. companies that could supply Covid testing.
Birx told the panel that Atlas and other Trump officials purposely weakened CDC's coronaviruses testing guidance in August 2020 to obscure how rapidly the virus was spreading across the country, the report said. According to the altered guidance, asymptomatic people shouldn't need to be tested, advice that was contrary to consensus science-based recommendations, it said. Dr. Birx stated that these changes were made specifically to reduce the amount of testing being conducted.
The subcommittee found in its investigation that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention refused to allow public briefings for more than three months, and the Trump White House blocked requests from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A top CDC official warned the public about the risks posed by the coronaviruses in a late-February 2020 briefing.
Another CDC official told the panel in April 2020 that the agency was asked to hold a briefing on a recommendation to wear cloth face coverings and present evidence of pediatric cases and deaths from Covid, but the Trump White House refused.
The subcommittee report said that media requests to interview them were denied during that period.
Documents obtained by the committee show that Trump political appointees tried to pressure the Food and Drug Administration to authorize ineffective Covid treatments the president was pushing, like hydroxychloroquine and convalescent plasma, over the objections of career scientists, according to the report.
The subcommittee said that Dr. Steven Hatfill, an adviser to former White House trade adviser Peter Navarro, may have declined leads to purchase N 95 masks in the spring 2020, because the products were not manufactured in the United States.
A senior CDC official who helped supervise the agency's coronaviruses response in the spring of 2020, said in an interview that the Trump administration issued guidance for faith communities in May of last year that softened some very important public health recommendations, such as removing all references to face coverings, suspending choirs, and language related to virtual services. Butler told the panel that the concerns about Americans getting sick and possibly dying because they relied on this watered-down guidance will haunt me for some time, the report said.
The report came as Covid cases surge across the country as the U.S. battles the new omicron and delta variants.