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

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

“The attacks on the Capitol were an assault on our democracy,” said Azar in a Letter launched this week before he left the government on January 20. “I implore you to continue to unequivocally condemn any form of violence … and to continue to support unreservedly the peaceful and orderly transition of power.”

Despite his rebuke to Trump, however, Azar’s resignation letter, valid at noon on the day of his inauguration, is more of a formality than anything. Two Trump cabinet secretaries resigned in protest in early January after the deadly attack on the United States Capitol, but Azar was not among 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 often send letters of resignation well before a new government takes power, but until recently, according to the New York Times, Trump was reluctant to request them while continuing to wage a doomed crusade against American democracy in a futile attempt. to stay in the office.

Last week, however, the Trump administration gave in to reality and requested these letters from the nearly 4,000 political nominees currently serving in the government – including Azar.

In addition to using his letter as a warning to Trump – who this week was impeached a second time for inciting insurrection – Azar also listed a list of accomplishments in his approximately three-year tenure at HHS (Azar is HHS’s second secretary of administration Trump).

A diverse collection of initiatives – drug prices, opioid crises and disparities in the rural health care system, to name a few – are worth mentioning, but the Trump administration’s failed response to coronavirus receives the highest bill in the letter.

“While we mourn every lost life,” Azar wrote of the coronavirus pandemic, which has killed more than 392,000 people in the United States, “Our initial, aggressive and comprehensive efforts have saved hundreds of thousands or even millions of American lives.”

In fact, much of the response to the Trump administration’s coronavirus – from the early days to the present day, when the country is reporting an average of 231,675 cases per day – has been unstable and incompetent, and even the vaccine’s launch in USA has evolved into something of a disaster, with initial vaccination numbers far behind administration targets and even a few doses of the vaccine being discarded unnecessarily.

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

That is not fully false: as Umair Irfan of Vox explained in December, developing a vaccine as quickly as the coronavirus vaccines Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna were created is, in fact, an “incomparable scientific feat”.

But again, the part of the vaccine effort that should be handled directly by the Trump administration – that is, the distribution of the vaccine created by private sector scientists – is full of costly errors.

Just this week, as the United States approaches the one-year anniversary of the country’s first known Covid-19 case, there have been failures. Although Azar said earlier this week that the administration would begin releasing doses of the vaccine previously held in reserve for a second injection, it was found that there was none to deliver.

According to a scoop in the Washington Post on Friday, the Trump administration had already started sending these doses last year, leaving the vaccine stock nearly depleted.

The lack of communication is likely to 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 serious risk. These plans were made based on your ‘release all supplies’ statement that you have in reserve. If this information [about the depleted vaccine reserve] if necessary, we will not be able to start vaccinating our vulnerable elderly people on January 23, as planned ”.

Biden has an ambitious plan to correct the US Covid-19 response

Biden’s new administration, however, pledged to correct the coronavirus response in the U.S. and accelerate the pace of vaccinations, with a target of 100 million doses of vaccine administered in the first 100 days in office.

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

Instead of inheriting the doubling speed of operation, according to Biden’s press secretary Jen Psaki, the new administration will create its own vaccine program, with former Chicago health commissioner Bechara Choucair leading the effort as a vaccine coordinator.

According to German Lopez of Vox, the federal government will also have a more prominent role in administering vaccines under the Biden administration, with the Federal Emergency Management Agency and National Guard units helping to establish new vaccine clinics.

In addition, the Biden plan, the most detailed form of which was already released on Friday, provides for the expansion of vaccine eligibility, the stricter use of the Defense Production Law to speed up vaccine production, more health professionals education campaign promoting vaccination.

These initiatives are also likely to be supported by a major injection of funds: Biden announced a $ 1.9 trillion stimulus package plan this week, including – if Congress approves it – $ 400 billion for the coronavirus response of USA.

As Lopez writes, it is a promising start:

Biden’s plan hits many of the marks I heard from experts in the past few weeks when I asked them what is going wrong with the vaccine launch in America.

First, the plan has clear objectives to address what supply chain experts call the “last mile” – the path that vaccines take from storage to injection into patients – ensuring that there is enough staff, infrastructure and planning to really putting vaccines into practice. Second, it takes steps to ensure that supply chain problems are proactively corrected, with careful monitoring and use of federal powers when necessary to resolve bottlenecks. Last but not least, there is a public education campaign to ensure that Americans really want to be vaccinated when it is their turn.

Still, implementation will not be easy, and there is a hurry: the US 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 on average.

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

“We are about to face the worst,” warned CDC director Robert Redfield in an interview with NPR. “And I think if you had heard my comments in August and September, I told people that I really thought that December, January and February would be the most difficult times that this country has ever experienced from a public health perspective. “