Ignored experts. Crippled the CDC. Politicians in charge of pandemic response. What in the world could possibly happen?
“President Trump and his top aides decided to shift primary responsibility for the coronavirus response to the states during a critical period of weeks in mid-April, eagerly seizing on overly optimistic predictions that the pandemic was fading so the president could reopen the economy and focus on his re-election, a Times investigation found.”
“The investigation revealed that key decisions about the handling of the virus during that crucial period were made not by the better known coronavirus task force, but by a small group of White House aides who convened each morning in the office of Mark Meadows, the president’s chief of staff.”
“One of their goals: to justify declaring victory in the fight against the virus. In that effort they frequently sought validation from Dr. Deborah L. Birx, a highly regarded infectious diseases expert, who was the chief evangelist in the West Wing for the idea that infections had peaked and the virus was fading quickly.”
Medicynical Note: With the best experts in the world at his disposal what does Trump do? He ignores warnings from the previous administration. He stops funding the pandemic response team. He cuts funding to the CDC and WHO. He ignores the advice of international experts and our own U.S. based experienced epidemiologists and scientists. He engages in magic thinking–it will go away like a miracle. And wouldn’t you know he selects the least competent to provide advice–Jared, Navarro, Azar and yes Birx (to be clear Birx is probably a competent self-promoting medical bureaucrat but appears by all the information available to be an incompetent inexperienced epidemiologist).
Bad choices and the worst results in the industrialized world. Trump’s confederacy of dunces.
Medicynic 