Alex Azar’s resignation letter paints a misleading picture of Trump’s response to coronavirus

Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar this week warned President Donald Trump has said that despite what he described as HHS accomplishments under his leadership, “Trump’s actions and rhetoric after the election … threaten to tarnish these and other historical legacies. this administration ”.

“The attacks on the Capitol was an attack on our democracy,” Azar said in a letter released this week before leaving government on January 20. “I implore you to continue to unequivocally condemn all forms of violence … and to continue to fully support the peaceful and orderly transition of power.

Despite his rebuke against Trump, however, Azar’s resignation letter, effective at noon on the day of the inauguration, is more of a formality than anything else. Two Trump cabinet secretaries resigned in protest earlier in January over the deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol, but Azar was not one of them.

In December, President-elect Joe Biden appointed California Attorney General Xavier Becerra to replace Azar as HHS secretary in the Biden administration.

Political appointees typically submit resignation letters long before a new administration takes power, but until recently, according to the New York Times, Trump had been reluctant to ask for them as he continued to lead a doomed crusade. against American democracy in a futile attempt to remain in place. Office.

Last week, however, the Trump administration acknowledged the reality and requested these letters from the nearly 4,000 politicians currently appointed to the government – including Azar.

In addition to using his letter as a warning to Trump – who was indicted this week for the second time for inciting insurgency – Azar also made a list of accomplishments during his roughly three-year tenure. with HHS (Azar is the second secretary of the HHS in the Trump administration).

A diverse set of initiatives – drug prices, the opioid crisis, and rural health care disparities, to name a few – are mentioned, but the failure of the response. the Trump administration to coronavirus receives the top spot in the letter.

“As we mourn every lost life,” Azar wrote of the coronavirus pandemic, which has now killed more than 392,000 people in the United States, “Our early, aggressive and comprehensive efforts have saved the lives of hundreds of thousands, if not millions of Americans.

In fact, much of the Trump administration’s coronavirus response – from its early days to the present day, when the country reports an average of 231,675 cases per day – has been restless and incompetent, and even the deployment of the US vaccine. has evolved into something of a disaster, with early immunization figures well behind administration targets and even some doses of the vaccine being needlessly thrown away.

Nonetheless, Azar praised Operation Warp Speed ​​- the Trump administration’s vaccination campaign – in his letter, which he said “achieved in nine months what many doubted would be possible in a year. and a half or more ”.

It’s not entirely False: As Vox’s Umair Irfan explained in December, developing a vaccine as quickly as the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna coronavirus vaccines were created is, in fact, an “unparalleled scientific feat”.

But once again, the part of the vaccination effort supposed to be directly managed by the Trump administration – namely the distribution of the vaccine created by scientists in the private sector – has been full of costly mistakes.

Even as recently as this week, as the United States nears the first anniversary of the country’s first known Covid-19 case, there have been escapes. Although Azar told States earlier this week that the administration will begin releasing doses of vaccine previously held in reserve for a second vaccine, it turns out there are none to release.

According to a Washington Post scoop Friday, the Trump administration had already started shipping those doses late last year, leaving the vaccine stock largely depleted.

Poor communication will likely have consequences at the state level. According to Oregon Health Director Patrick Allen in a letter to Azar, the lack of additional doses “puts our plans to expand eligibility at risk. These plans were developed on the basis of your statement about “releasing the entire supply” that you have in reserve. If this information [about the depleted vaccine reserve] is correct, we will not be able to start immunizing our vulnerable seniors on January 23, as planned.

Biden has ambitious plan to correct US Covid-19 response

Biden’s incoming administration, however, has pledged to correct the US response to the coronavirus and speed up the pace of vaccinations, with a target of 100 million doses of vaccine delivered in the first 100 days in office.

“This will be one of the most difficult operational efforts we have ever undertaken as a nation,” Biden said Thursday of the US vaccination effort. “We will have to move heaven and earth to get more people vaccinated, create more places where they can get vaccinated, mobilize more medical teams to get vaccinated in people’s arms.

Rather than inheriting Operation Warp Speed, Biden’s new press secretary, Jen Psaki, the new administration will create its own immunization program, with former Chicago health commissioner Bechara Choucair leading the effort as the vaccine coordinator.

German Lopez de Vox says the federal government will also play a larger role in administering vaccines under the Biden administration, with the Federal Emergency Management Agency and National Guard units both helping to establish new clinics. vaccination.

In addition, the Biden plan, the most detailed form of which was released yet on Friday, calls for expanded vaccine eligibility, more stringent use of the Defense Production Act to speed up vaccine production. , more public health workers and an education campaign promoting immunization.

These initiatives will also likely be backed by a large infusion of funds: Biden this week announced a $ 1.9 trillion stimulus package, including – if Congress approves it – $ 400 billion for the U.S. response to the coronavirus .

As Lopez writes, it’s a promising start:

Biden’s plan achieves many of the goals I have heard from experts over the past few weeks as I asked them what is wrong with the vaccine rollout in America.

First, the plan has clear goals for addressing what supply chain experts call the ‘last mile’ – the path that vaccines travel from storage to injection in patients – by making sure it there are enough people, infrastructure and planning to actually put up the gun. Second, it takes steps to ensure supply chain issues are resolved proactively, with careful oversight and the use of federal powers when necessary to address bottlenecks. Finally, but just as crucial, there is a public education campaign to make sure Americans really want to get vaccinated when it’s their turn.

Still, implementation won’t be easy and we must hurry: The United States reported more than 4,000 deaths in a single day for the first time earlier this month and continues to report well over 200,000 new cases per day on average.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also warned this week that a recently discovered more transmissible strain of Covid-19 is spreading rapidly in the United States and could lead to an even more catastrophic number of cases and deaths in the near future. Rapid vaccination is considered the best way to limit the threat posed by this new strain and to reduce the number of new cases overall.

“We are on the verge of being for the worst,” CDC director Robert Redfield warned in an interview with NPR on Friday. “And I think if you had listened to my comments in August and September, I told people that I really thought December, January and February were going to be the most difficult times this country has ever seen from a perspective. of public health. of view. “