Fauci and Birx interviews detail Trump’s failed response to coronavirus

It didn’t take long for the two scientific sides of former President Donald Trump’s failed coronavirus response to talk about how dysfunctional efforts to contain the pandemic really were under the 45th president.

The first weekend after Trump left the White House, Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx – both members of the White House coronavirus task force Trump coordinated by Birx – conducted interviews with national media in the which described a culture at Trump’s White House dismissed scientific expertise and valued the kind of denial that resulted in Trump continuing to hold crowded political rallies, even with the deaths and cases of coronaviruses triggered in the fall.

“We would say things like, ‘This is an outbreak. Infectious diseases take their own course, unless someone does something to intervene. ‘And then he would get up and start talking:’ It will pass, it is magical, it will disappear, ‘”Fauci told the New York Times.

Birx made similar comments to CBS during an interview with Face the Nation presenter Margaret Brennan, saying: “there were people [in the White House] who definitely believed it was a scam, ”adding that Trump had a tendency to listen to people who told him what he wanted to hear, even if that information had no scientific basis.

“I saw the president presenting graphs that I never did,” she said. “So I know that someone – someone outside or someone inside – was creating a parallel set of data and graphs that were shown to the president. I still don’t know who, but I know what I sent and I know that what was in your hands was different from that. “

Fauci corroborated this point, telling the Times that in the early days of the pandemic, he was “really concerned” to note that Trump “was receiving information from people who were calling him, I don’t know who, people he knew business from, saying: ‘Hey, I heard about this drug, isn’t it great?’ or, ‘Boy, this convalescent plasma is really phenomenal.’ “

“He would take their opinion seriously – not based on data, just anecdotes – that something can be really important,” added Fauci. “It wasn’t just hydroxychloroquine, it was a variety of alternative medicine approaches. It was always, ‘A guy called me, a friend of mine blah blah blah.’ That was when my anxiety started to increase ”.

Birx’s revelation represented an effort to rehabilitate his damaged reputation

Birx emerged from the Trump era with his reputation more in shambles than Fauci. Although both did their best to avoid contradicting the president in public, Birx’s tendency to praise Trump heartily, even when he announced unproven miracle cures and downplayed the severity of a pandemic that killed 400,000 Americans before he stepped down, did it seems that she was putting politics first.

Fauci did not share this trend. He refused to disparage Trump, even though he had the opportunity, but he often publicly contradicted the former president.

Unlike Fauci – who now serves as medical advisor to President Joe Biden, in addition to his role as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases – Birx was not invited to join the Biden government. This made his interview with CBS seem, in part, an effort to rehabilitate his image before his retirement from the federal government.

Birx was thrilled to talk about his legacy and how he could end up being spotted by his time coordinating the White House coronavirus task force of Trump. She tried to dispel the realization that she was sometimes more concerned with staying in Trump’s good graces – something Fauci didn’t seem to care about – than being hostile to the American people.

Asked about an infamous incident during a news conference in which Trump suggested to her that disinfectant injections or sunlight treatments could be miraculous cures for the coronavirus, Birx tried to downplay her role.

“I didn’t even know what to do at that moment,” she said, adding later: “People then want to define you at the moment.”

However, this was not the only time that Birx failed to correct the bad information that Trump was giving the public. There were countless occasions when she seemed to go out of her way to interfere with Trump’s wrong decisions, ranging from defending your refusal to wear a mask for persuade the CDC to rule out presumed positive cases of the count of deaths by coronavirus. She told CBS that she was constantly considering resigning, but said no because she thought she could do more good things from within the government. Finally, she came to the conclusion “just before the election” that “I was getting nowhere”.

Birx said during the interview that Trump “appreciated the seriousness” of the pandemic in March and April, only to lose focus when “the country started to open” and election day was approaching. Although a report by journalist Bob Woodward revealed in September that Trump quickly realized that the coronavirus posed a serious threat, what Birx’s claim ignores is that Trump did not share these private beliefs with the American people.

Instead, he spent the first few months of the pandemic saying that the coronavirus would disappear on its own “like a miracle” and dismissing Democrats’ efforts to take it more seriously as “a scam”. Fauci’s interview with the New York Times shed light on how Birx’s account reviews history.

Fauci’s interview highlights Trump’s fundamental inability

While Birx made it appear that the response to Trump’s coronavirus started off strong, Fauci’s interview with the Times shows a president who was unable to respond competently to a pandemic – and who engaged in magical thinking from the beginning.

“I was trying to express the gravity of the situation, and the president’s response always leaned towards, ‘Well, it’s not that bad, right?’ And I would say, ‘Yes, it’s that bad,’ ”said Fauci. “It was almost a reflex response, trying to persuade him to minimize it. I’m not saying, ‘I want you to minimize this’, but, ‘Oh, really, was it that bad?’ “

These comments echo statements made by Fauci last Thursday, during his first public comments as adviser Biden, when he characterized Trump’s departure from office as a breath of fresh air.

“One of the new features of this government is that if you don’t know the answer, don’t guess. Suffice it to say that you don’t know the answer, “said Fauci during last Thursday’s press conference, adding on another point that Trump’s propaganda of unproven and potentially dangerous” miracle cures “for coronavirus was particularly” uncomfortable ” for him, “because they were not based on scientific facts. “

Although Fauci tried to avoid directly reprimanding Trump publicly, he contradicted his false claims about Covid-19 being as deadly as the flu and tried to correct the record when Trump would promote unproven treatments as possible cures for coronavirus. He told the New York Times that even before Trump considered firing him at one of his campaign rallies, he received death threats – and in one case, a letter containing gunpowder.

“One day I received a letter in the mail, opened it and a cloud of dust came down my face and chest,” he said.

“It was very, very disturbing for me and my wife, because it was in my office,” he continued, adding that, fortunately, the substance turned out to be “not at all benign.”

Fauci at one point expressed empathy for Birx because she had to deal daily with Scott Atlas – a neuroradiologist with no previous experience in infectious diseases that Trump brought to the White House as a coronavirus consultant. Atlas was an advocate of the discredited idea that the federal government should let the coronavirus infect as many people as possible.

“I tried to get closer [Atlas] and say, ‘Let’s sit down and talk because we obviously have some differences,’ ”Fauci told the Times. “His attitude is that he reviews literature intensively, we may have differences, but he thinks that he is right. I thought, ‘Okay, I’m not going to invest a lot of time trying to convert that person’, and I just went my own way. But Debbie Birx had to live with that person in the White House every day, so it was a much more painful situation for her. “

Atlas’s reluctance to listen to anything he didn’t want was a trait he shared with Trump, who did his best to ignore the CDC’s own advice on meetings, holding oversized rallies during his failed reelection campaign, even with scientific experts warning that the US was entering a winter in which cases and deaths would increase. Trump ended up in the hospital in early October after contracting the virus, but not even that experience punished him.

As Fauci told the Times:

When [Trump] was on Walter Reed [hospital] and he was getting monoclonal antibodies, he said, “Tony, that really made a big difference. I feel much, much better. That’s really good. “I didn’t want to burst your bubble, but I said,” Well, no, this is an N equal to 1. You may be starting to feel better anyway. ” [In scientific literature, an experiment with just one subject is described as “n = 1.”] And he said, “Oh, no, no, absolutely not. This material is very good. It changed me completely. ”So I figured the best part of the courage would be not to argue with him.

None of this is surprising – but it is still remarkable

What Birx and Fauci said during their interviews is not necessarily surprising. We have long understood that the response to the Trump White House coronavirus was a disaster, especially when compared to countries like Australia and Japan, which did a much better job of limiting infections and deaths. We know that Trump has a tendency to engage in illusions and aversion to scientific reasoning.

But what Birx and Fauci’s willingness to speak openly after Trump’s departure illustrates is how bad things were under the previous administration. Now it’s up to the Biden government to try to clean up the mess left behind after a year of politically motivated short-term thinking, in which public health experts like Fauci and Birx had to struggle daily with questions about whether it would be worth it for them to keep showing up at work. .