Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar this week warned President Donald Trump that, despite what he described as achievements by HHS under his supervision, Trump’s “actions and rhetoric after the election … threaten to tarnish this and other historical legacies of this government.”
“The attacks on the Capitol were an attack on our democracy,” Azar said in a statement. letter released this week before his departure from government on January 20. “I beg you to continue to unequivocally condemn any form of violence … and to support the peaceful and orderly transition of power unconditionally.”
In contrast to the @ CNN chyron, I still serve the American people at HHS. I believe it is my duty to ensure a smooth transition to the president of Biden’s team during the pandemic, and will remain as secretary until 20 January. pic.twitter.com/zXe1y2om1k
– Secretary Alex Azar (@SecAzar) 16 January 2021
Despite Trump’s reprimand, Azar’s resignation letter, which takes effect this afternoon on Inauguration Day, is more of a formality than anything. Two Trump cabinet secretaries resigned in protest earlier in January following the deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol, but Azar was not one of them.
In December, the elected president, Joe Biden, nominated Attorney General Xavier Becerra in California to replace Azar as HHS secretary in the Biden administration.
Political appointments usually submit resignation letters well before a new government comes to power, but according to the New York Times, Trump was until recently reluctant to request them because he continued to wage a doomed crusade against American democracy in a futile attempt to stay in. office.
Last week, however, the Trump administration conceded reality and asked for the letters from the approximately 4,000 political appointments currently serving in the government – including Azar.
In addition to using his letter as a warning to Trump – who was charged a second time this week for inciting insurgency – Azar also rattled off a list of accomplishments during his three-year tenure with HHS ( Azar is the second secretary of HHS the Trump administration).
A variety of initiatives – drug prices, the opioid crisis and rural inequalities in health care, to name a few – are mentioned, but the Trump administration’s failed coronavirus response received the best bill in the letter.
“While 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 saved the lives of hundreds of thousands or even millions of Americans.”
In fact, much of the Trump administration’s coronavirus response – from its earliest days to the present day, when the country reports an average of 231,675 cases a day – was tortuous and incompetent, and even the U.S. vaccination of vaccines has turned into something of a disaster. , with early vaccination numbers lagging far behind in administration goals and even some doses of the vaccine being discarded unnecessarily.
Nevertheless, in his letter, Azar praised Operation Warp Speed - the vaccination of the Trump administration, which he said had “reached within nine months what much doubt would be possible in a year and a half.”
It is not completely false: As Umair Irfan of Vox explained in December, developing a vaccine as fast as the Pfizer BioNTech and Moderna coronavirus vaccines were created is an ‘unmatched scientific achievement’.
But again, the part of the vaccine attempt intended to be handled directly by the Trump administration – namely the distribution of the vaccine created by scientists in the private sector – was full of costly mistakes.
Already this week, when the USA approaches the one-year anniversary of the first known Covid-19 case in the country, there were whispers. Although Azar said earlier this week that the government would release the vaccine doses previously held in reserve for a second time, it appears there is no one to release.
According to a report by the Washington Post, the Trump administration already began shipping the doses last year, leaving the vaccine supply largely depleted.
The wrong communication is likely to have consequences at the state level. According to Patrick Allen, Oregon’s director of health, in a letter to Azar, the lack of additional doses puts our plans to extend the grant at serious risk. These plans were made on the basis of your confidence in your statement on the ‘release of the entire stock’ you have in reserve. If this information [about the depleted vaccine reserve] accurate, we will not be able to start vaccinating our vulnerable elderly on January 23, as planned. ”
Biden has an ambitious plan to correct the US Covid-19 response
However, the incoming Biden administration has promised to correct the US coronavirus response and accelerate the rate of vaccinations, with a target of 100 million doses of vaccine being administered in the office within the first 100 days.
“This will be one of the most challenging operational efforts we have ever undertaken as a country,” Biden said on Thursday about the U.S. vaccination effort. “We will have to move heaven and earth to get more people vaccinated, to create more places to be vaccinated, to mobilize more medical teams to shoot people in the arms.”
Instead of inheriting Operation Warp Speed, according to incoming Biden press secretary Jen Psaki, the new administration will set up its own vaccination program, with former Chicago health commissioner Bechara Choucair taking the lead as vaccine coordinator.
OWS is the Trump team’s name for their program. We are phasing in a new structure that will have a different name than OWS. Many of the state officials will be vital to our response, but the urgent need is to address issues in the Trump team’s approach to vaccine distribution.
– Jen Psaki (@jrpsaki) 15 January 2021
According to Vox’s German Lopez, the federal government will also play a more prominent role in administering vaccines under the Biden administration, with the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the National Guard units both helping to set up new vaccination clinics.
In addition, the Biden Plan, the most detailed form of which was announced on Friday, calls for widespread admission to vaccines, to make strict use of the Defense Production Act to speed up vaccine production, more public health workers and an education campaign to promote vaccination.
These initiatives are also likely to be supported by a major addition of funding: Biden announced a $ 1.9 billion stimulus package plan this week, including – if Congress approves it – $ 400 billion for the U.S. coronavirus response.
As Lopez writes, this is a promising start:
Biden’s plan achieves many of the points I’ve heard from experts over the past few weeks when I asked them about what’s going wrong with the vaccination of 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 in patients – by ensuring there are enough staff, infrastructure and planning to shoot in the arms to place. Second, it takes steps to ensure that supply chain issues are proactively resolved, with the necessary monitoring and use of federal powers when necessary to address bottlenecks. Finally, but just as importantly, there is a public education campaign to ensure that Americans actually want to be vaccinated when it’s their turn.
Implementation will still not be easy, and it should be soon: Earlier this month, for the first time ever, the US reported more than 4,000 deaths in one day, reporting an average of more than 200,000 new cases per day.
The Centers for Disease Control & Prevention also warned this week that a more transmissible strain of Covid-19 could spread rapidly in the US and could lead to an even more catastrophic number of cases and deaths in the near future. Rapid vaccination is considered to be the best way to reduce the threat of this new strain and reduce the number of new cases in general.
“We are on the verge of being the worst,” CDC director Robert Redfield warned in an NPR interview on Friday. ‘And I think if you were to listen to my remarks in August and September, I told people that I really think December, January and February would be the hardest time this country has ever experienced from a public health point of view. of view. ”