In Fauci and Birx interviews, Trump’s failed response to coronavirus is explained

It did not take long before the two scientific faces of former President Donald Trump’s failed coronavirus response spoke out about how dysfunctional efforts to curb the pandemic 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 Trump White House coronavirus task force coordinated by Birx – interviewed national media in which they discounted a culture in the Trump White House that discounted scientific expertise and placed a premium on that kind of denial which led to Trump holding full political rallies, even as deaths and cases in the coronavirus skyrocketed in the fall.

“We would say things like, ‘This is an outbreak.’ Infectious diseases run on their own unless someone does something to intervene. “And then he would get up and start talking about ‘It’s going to disappear, it’s magical, it’s going to disappear,’ ‘Fauci told the New York Times.

Birx made similar remarks to CBS during an interview with Face the Nation host Margaret Brennan and said: ‘there were people [in the White House] who certainly believed it was a joke, ‘and added that Trump has a penchant for listening to people who tell him what he wants to hear, even if the information has no scientific basis.

“I saw the president presenting graphs that I never made,” she said. ‘So I know that someone – someone outside or someone inside’ creates a parallel set of data and graphics that are shown to the president. I do not know to this day who, but I know what I sent, and I know what was in his hands, other than that. ”

Fauci confirms this and tells the Times that in the early days of the pandemic he was’ really concerned ‘to note that Trump’ gets input from people calling him, I do not know who, people he knew. business, and said, ‘Hey, I’ve heard of this remedy, isn’ t it wonderful? ‘ or, ‘Boy, this recovery system is really phenomenal.’ ‘

“He will take their opinion just as seriously – based on no data, just anecdotes – that something could be really important,” Fauci added. ‘It was not just hydroxychloroquine, it was a variety of alternative medicine approaches. It was always, “A man called me, a friend of mine from blah, blah, blah.” It was then that my anxiety began to increase. ”

Birx’s tell-all was an attempt to restore her damaged reputation

Birx originated from the Trump era with her reputation more in tatters than Fauci. Although both made an effort not to contradict the president in public, Birx’s tendency to praise Trump enormously, even though he viewed unproven miracles and the severity of a pandemic that killed 400,000 Americans before he left office, made it appear as if she were to put politics first.

Fauci did not share this tendency. He refused to disrespect Trump, even giving him the chance, but often publicly contradicted the former president.

Unlike Fauci – who now serves as medical adviser to President Joe Biden, in addition to his role as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases – Birx was not asked to join the Biden administration. This made her interview with CBS appear in part as an attempt to rehabilitate her image before her upcoming resignation from the federal government.

Birx became emotional as she talked about her legacy and how it could be hampered by her time coordinating the Trump White House Coronavirus Task Force. She tried to push back the perception that she was sometimes more concerned about staying in Trump’s good grace – something Fauci apparently does not care about – than with the American people.

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

“I did not even know what to do at that moment,” she said, adding later, “People want to define you at that moment.”

However, this was by no means the only time that Birx had corrected bad information that Trump had given to the public. There have been numerous occasions in which she seems to be going out of her way to interfere with poor decisions Trump has made, ranging from defends his refusal to wear a mask on to accuse the CDC of excluding suspected positive cases of the number of coronavirus deaths. She told CBS that she was constantly considering resigning, but said she did not do so because she thought she could do more good from within the government. Eventually, she concludes “just before the election” that “I’m not getting anywhere.”

During the interview, Birx claimed that Trump appreciated the seriousness of the pandemic in March and April, only to lose focus when “the country begins to open” and election day approaches. While reporting from journalist Bob Woodward in September did reveal that Trump quickly came to the realization that the coronavirus posed a serious threat, Birx’s allegation was ignored that Trump did not share these private beliefs with the American people. .

Instead, he spent the earliest months of the pandemic saying the coronavirus would disappear on its own ‘like a miracle’ and downplay the Democrats’ efforts to take it more seriously, as a farce. Fauci’s interview with the New York Times sheds light on how Birx’s report reviews history.

Fauci’s interview highlights Trump’s fundamental disability

While Birx made it appear as if Trump’s coronavirus response was starting strong, Fauci’s interview with the Times paints a picture of a president who was unable to respond adequately to a pandemic – and who from the start was engaged in magical thinking.

“I would try to express the seriousness of the situation, and the president’s response always tends to be, ‘Well, that’s not so bad, is it? “And I would say, ‘Yeah, that’s so bad,'” Fauci said. ‘It was almost a reflex reaction to try to entice you to reduce it. I did not say, ‘I want you to limit it,’ but ‘Oh, was that really that bad?’ ‘

The remarks reflect the statements Fauci made last Thursday during his first public comment as Biden’s adviser, when he characterized Trump’s departure as a breath of fresh air.

‘One of the new things in this administration is if you do not know the answer, do not guess. Just say you do not know what the answer is, “Fauci said at last Thursday’s press conference, adding at another point that Trump’s provocation of unproven and potentially dangerous ‘miracle cures’ for the coronavirus was particularly ‘uncomfortable’ for him. , ‘because they are not scientifically sound. ”

While Fauci tried to reprimand Trump directly in public, he refuted his false allegations that Covid-19 was as deadly as the flu and tried to correct the record when Trump would promote unproven treatments as possible cures for the coronavirus. He told the New York Times that even before Trump fired him over one of his campaign rallies, he had received death threats – and in one case, a letter with powder.

“One day I got a letter in the mail, and I opened it and a powder puff came over my face and on my chest,” he said.

“It was very, very upsetting to me and my wife because it was in my office,” he continued, adding that the substance was fortunately “a benign nothing”.

At one point, Fauci expressed empathy with Birx for dealing with Scott Atlas on a daily basis – a neuroradiologist without prior expert infectious diseases who brought Trump into the White House as a coronavirus consultant. Atlas was a proponent of the discredited idea that the federal government should infect the coronavirus with as many people as possible.

‘I tried to approach [Atlas] and says, ‘Let’s sit down and talk, because of course we have a difference,’ Fauci told the Times. ‘His attitude was that he judged the literature intensively, we may differ, but he thinks he’s right. I thought, ‘Okay, I’m not going to spend a lot of time converting this person,’ and I just went my own way. But Debbie Birx had to live with this person in the White House every day, so it was a very painful situation for her. ‘

Atlas’ reluctance to hear something he did not want to hear was a feature he shared with Trump. was on its way to a winter in which cases and deaths would increase. Trump ended up in the hospital in early October after contracting the virus, but even the experience did not discipline him.

As Fauci told the Times:

When [Trump] was in Walter Reed [hospital] and he got monoclonal antibodies, and he said, ‘Tony, it really made a big difference. I feel much, much better. These are really good things. I did not want to burst his bubble, but I said, ‘Well, no, it’s an N equal to 1. Maybe you started to feel better anyway.’ [In scientific literature, an experiment with just one subject is described as “n = 1.”] And he said, ‘Oh, no, no no, absolutely not. This stuff is really good. It just completely turned me around. “So I thought the best part of bravery was not arguing 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 coronavirus response of the Trump White House was a disaster, especially compared to countries like Australia and Japan that have done much better work to curb infections and deaths. We knew that Trump tends to wishful thinking and has an aversion to scientific reasoning.

But what illustrates the willingness of Birx and Fauci to speak out of office immediately after Trump leaves is how bad things were under the previous government. It now falls to Biden’s government to clean up the mess left after a year of politically motivated short-term thinking, in which public health experts such as Fauci and Birx had to wrestle daily with questions about whether it was worth it. it’s for them to keep showing up at work.