When did you first realize that things were going wrong between you and President Trump?
This coincided greatly with the rapid increase in business in the northeastern part of the country, especially the metropolitan area in New York. I would try to express the seriousness of the situation, and the president’s response always tends to be, “Well, that’s not that bad, is it?” And I would say, “Yeah, that’s so bad.” It was almost a reflex reaction that you are trying to attract to reduce it. Not saying, “I want you to reduce it,” but: “Was it really that bad?”
And the other thing that really worried me was that it was clear that he was getting input from people who called him. , Is not it wonderful? Or, ‘Boy, this recovery plasma is really phenomenal.’ And I will try to calmly explain that you find out if something works by doing an appropriate clinical trial; you get the information, give you a peer review. And he would say, ‘Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, these things really work.’
He will take their opinion just as seriously – based on no data, just anecdotes – that something can be really important. It was not just hydroxychloroquine, it was a variety of alternative medicine-type approaches. It was always, “A man called me, a friend of mine from blah, blah, blah.” That’s when my anxiety started to increase.
Did you have any problems with him during the first three years of his presidency?
No, he barely knew who I was. The first time I met him was in September 2019, when they asked me to come down to the White House, bring my white coat and stand there while he signed an executive order on something about flu . From January, February 2020, it was an intense engagement that came down to the White House very, very often.
There was a point last February when things changed. Alex Azar led the White House Coronavirus Task Force, and then Mike Pence was suddenly, and President Trump was on stage, taking the questions and arguing with reporters. What happened?
To be honest with you, I do not know. We have, you know, had the standard kind of science-based, public health meetings. Then I started to get anxious that it was not going in the right direction – the anecdotally driven situations, the minimization, the president surrounds himself with people who say things that make no scientific sense. We would say things like, ‘This is an outbreak. Infectious diseases run on their own unless someone does something to intervene. And then he gets up and starts talking about, “It’s going to disappear, it’s magical, it’s going to disappear.”