The Other (Pandemic) Hearing You Probably Weren't Following Last Week
Last week most people were focused on hearings about the former president's (FP's) corruption and malfeasance with respect to a plot to overturn then 2020 election (until the Supremes cancelled a constitutional right on Friday). But there was another hearing going on.
On Thursday the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis held a hearing on the FP's corruption and malfeasance in the pandemic domain. It featured Dr. Deborah Birx, his lead on the pandemic response.
I blogged about Dr. Birx earlier this year on the anniversary of the FP's inject-them-with-disinfectants comment. I noted how she was soldiering when she failed to call-out his crazy ideas and suggested this is a good reason not to have ex-military people in positions like hers.
That notwithstanding, she was very qualified for her job. She coordinated responses to other epidemics, including AIDS, Ebola, and Avian Flu. The hearing made it clear she knew exactly what was going on and what to do about it. Her boss had other ideas.
The transcripts of the hearing are available in two volumes (V1 and V2). Reading through those is a slog, but I did it so you don't have to. You're welcome.
Birx talked talked repeatedly about looking at Italy in March 2020 and knowing our hospitals would soon be overrun. She knew that asymptomatic spread was the issue:
My assessment was, before coming into the task force, that the U.S. was overly focused on containment and containment through the eyes of symptomatic infection. I felt there was broad community spread, and so being able to get people to present on mitigation measures that had been studied in a model, I thought would be very helpful to the task force.
Even at that time the FP and administration officials were trying to downplay the seriousness of the virus by comparing it to the flu, a comparison she rejected:
I just want to make it clear that the series of conversations that were critical were that this was not the flu, that this was more deadly than the flu, was spreading rapidly, and these precautions needed to be taken.
She said that early White House messaging "created a sense among the American people that this was not going to be a serious pandemic.” But "when you're asking for behavioral change with Americans or anyplace where I've worked in the world, you really need everybody on the same sheet of music making the same recommendations so that there's no ability to push one agenda over another."
But after the spring of 2020 “the White House was distracted about its reelection” and lost interest in the pandemic. That is about the same time that the FP appointed Dr. Scott Atlas, a Fox News talking head, as a special pandemic advisor.
Atlas is the one who planted the idea that testing was driving cases, and less testing equals less cases. She noted
his strong belief that anybody who was only going to have mild disease or asymptomatic disease should be allowed and actually encouraged to get the virus and spread the virus because that was your pathway, although it's never said that way, to herd immunity. So anybody who wasn't in the vulnerable group should be allowed to increase activities without mitigation because it didn't matter if they became infected with COVID.
No only that, he regarded mitigation efforts as a violation of "human rights:"
He believed that testing and proactive testing, which was a critical compartment of my strategy and I think the rest of the doctors on the task force to actually find the silent in asymptomatic spread. He believed that that was a violation of human rights to want to test people who would not have serious disease and believed that that was equivalent to a lockdown. To ask those people who were positive and young to isolate, that that was considered a lockdown of their human rights and their ability to be in the country.
She confirmed a quote in an interview for a book where she said "[f]ighting the virus and Scott Atlas together is the hardest thing I've had to do" saying he made "use of partial data to support his theories, the opinions without documentation."
Regarding the FP's embrace of misinformation, she said "[w]hen you no longer agree on what is actually happening in the country and what needs to be done, and there’s not consensus on that, then you lose the ability to execute in the maximum efficient and effective way.” And we saw the results.
Haven't We Heard This Before?
The story here is remarkably like the one emerging from the January 6 hearing this week. The FP had competent advisors giving him sound advice about what he should and shouldn't do.
Instead of listening to them he ignored their advice. He did this for corrupt reasons, namely because he thought following their advice would threaten his chances for remaining in office after the 2020 election.
Then he sought out crazies and quacks who would tell him what he wanted to hear, and acted on their advice. As a result, experts estimated that as of a year ago the United States had an estimated 400,000 more deaths than we would have, had the pandemic been competently managed.
So what's worse? An insurrection at the Capitol or almost half a million needless deaths?
