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In interviews broadcast on CNN on Sunday evening, former President Donald J. Trump’s pandemic officials confirmed in clear and unequivocal terms what was already an open secret in Washington: the response to the pandemic of administration was riddled with dysfunction, and discord, untruths and infighting were very likely costing many lives.
Dr Deborah L. Birx, Mr Trump’s coronavirus response coordinator, has suggested that hundreds of thousands of Americans may have died needlessly, and Admiral Brett P. Giroir, the testing czar, said that the administration had lied to the public about the availability of the trial.
The comments were part of a series of bombs that emerged during a CNN special report featuring medics who led the government’s response to the coronavirus in 2020.
Dr Robert R. Redfield, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, accused Mr Trump’s Health Secretary Alex M. Azar III and the secretary’s leadership team of pressuring him to he reviews scientific reports. “Now he can deny that, but it’s true,” Dr Redfield said in an interview with Dr Sanjay Gupta, CNN’s chief medical correspondent. Mr. Azar, in a statement, denied it.
Dr Stephen K. Hahn, the former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, said his relationship with Mr Azar had become “strained” after the Secretary of Health revoked the agency’s power to regulate drugs. coronavirus tests. “It was a line in the sand for me,” Dr Hahn said. When asked by Dr Gupta if Mr Azar yelled at him, Dr Hahn replied, “You should ask him that question.”
But it was Dr Birx, who was pilloried for praising Mr Trump for being “So attentive to scientific literature” and for failing to publicly correct the president when he made wacky claims about unproven therapies, the revelations of which were perhaps the most convincing.
As of Sunday, more than 548,000 Americans died from infection with the coronavirus. “I look at it that way,” she said. “The first time, we have an excuse. There were around 100,000 deaths as a result of this initial wave. “
“All the rest,” she said, referring to nearly 450,000 deaths, “in my mind could have been mitigated or significantly reduced” if the administration had acted more aggressively.
In what appeared in one of her first television interviews since leaving the White House in January, she also described a “very uncomfortable, very direct and very difficult” phone call with Mr. Trump after speaking about the dangers of virus last summer. . “Everyone in the White House was upset by this interview,” she said.
After that, she decided to travel the country to talk to heads of state and local about masks, social distancing and other public health measures the president didn’t want her to explain to the American public from the podium. of the White House.
Dr Gupta asked if she was censored. “Obviously someone was preventing me from doing it,” she said. “I understood that I couldn’t be national because the president could see it.”
Several officials, including Dr Anthony S. Fauci – who unlike others is a career scientist and now advises President Biden – have accused China, where the virus was first detected, of not being open enough with United States. And several, including Dr Redfield and Admiral Giroir, said the early stumbles with the tests – and the attitude in the White House that the tests made the President look bad by increasing the number of case reports – were a serious problem in the administration’s response.
And the problems with the testing went beyond Mr. Trump’s simple obsession with optics. Admiral Giroir said the administration simply did not have as many tests as senior officials claimed at the time.
“When we said there were millions of tests – there weren’t, right?” he said. “There were test components available, but not the full offering.”
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