The coronavirus is still killing as many as 1,000 Americans per
day — but the Trump administration isn’t saying much about
it.
It’s been more than a month since the White House halted its
daily coronavirus task force briefings. Top officials like
infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci have largely disappeared
from national television — with Faucimaking just four cable TV
appearances in May after being a near fixture on Sunday shows
across March and April — and are frequently restricted from
testifying before Congress. Meanwhile, President Donald Trump is
preparing to
resume his campaign rallies after a three-month hiatus, an
attempted signal to voters that normalcy is returning ahead of
November’s election, and that he’s all but put the pandemic
behind him.
“We’ve made every decision correctly,†Trump
claimed in remarks in the Rose Garden on Friday morning. “We
may have some embers or some ashes or we may have some flames
coming, but we’ll put them out. We’ll stomp them out.â€
Inside the White House, top advisers like Jared Kushner
privately assured colleagues last month that the outbreak was well
in hand — citing data on declines in community spread
— and that the long-feared “second wave†may have even
been averted, according to three current and former officials.
However, new data from states like Florida and mass protests across
the country are renewing concerns about the virus’ spread. Texas,
for instance, has reported two straight days of record-breaking
coronavirus hospitalizations — highs that come shortly after the
state kicked off the third stage of its reopening plan.
Those officials also acknowledge that the Covid-19 task force
has scaled back its once-daily internal meetings — the task force
now meets twice per week — but insist the pandemic
response remains a priority. One official with direct knowledge of
the administration’s strategy cited efforts to
scale up testing, accelerate the development of treatments and
vaccines and perform other behind-the-scenes work to get ready for
a potential fall surge.
“We’re delivering the supplies and resources that states
asked for,†said the official. “This doesn’t need to be the
public ‘coronavirus show’ every day anymore.â€
“You can’t win,” said a senior administration official.
“Some people complained for weeks that ‘we don’t want so much
White House involvement,’ and that ‘the President should stop
doing daily briefings,’ and then they turn around and complain
that there aren’t enough or as many briefings.”
But the White House’s apparent eagerness to change the subject
comes as new coronavirus clusters — centered around meatpacking
plants, prisons and other facilities — drive spikes in disparate
states like Utah
and
Arkansas. Meanwhile, states and major cities are lifting
lockdowns and reopening their economies, prompting public health
experts to fret that additional outbreaks are imminent. And several
Democratic governors also have defied their own states’ social
distancing restrictions to join mass protests over police
brutality, where hundreds of thousands of Americans have spilled
into the streets, further raising public health risks.
The fear is that all the mixed signals will only confuse people,
stoke public skepticism over the health threat and promote the
belief the worst is over just as the outbreak enters a dangerous
new phase.
“Cases are rising, including from cases in congregate
settings,†said Luciana Borio, who led pandemic preparedness for
the National Security Council from 2017 to 2019. “We still have a
pandemic.â€
Nine current and former administration officials, as well as
outside experts, further detailed how the White House is steadily
ramping down the urgency to fight a threat that continues to sicken
more than 100,000 Americans per week and is spiking in more than 20
states.
For instance, the administration in recent days told state
health officials that it planned to reorganize its pandemic
response, with the Department of Health and Human Services and its
agencies taking over the bulk of the day-to-day responsibilities
from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
“The acuity of the response is not what it was, so they’re
trying to go back to a little more of a normal ongoing presence,â€
said Marcus Plescia, chief medical officer of the Association of
State and Territorial Health Officials.
The coronavirus task force, which used to send daily updates to
state officials, has done so with less regularity over the last
several weeks, Plescia said. And the Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention has restructured its daily conference calls with
states, moving away from the practice of giving top-down briefings
to encouraging state officials to offer updates on what they’re
seeing in their parts of the country.
One current and one former FEMA official also said they’re
keen to have HHS resume its leadership role in containing the
coronavirus so FEMA
can make contingencies for a summer of hurricanes, floods and
other natural disasters.
“Given the likelihood that we will soon see both hurricanes
and coronavirus, HHS should manage the ongoing pandemic response so
FEMA can prepare for coming ‘coronacanes,’†Daniel Kaniewski,
who served as the top deputy at FEMA through January,
wrote last week. “But they need to act soon. Coronacanes are
in the forecast.â€
Meanwhile, officials in at least 19 states have recorded
two-week trends of increasing coronavirus cases, including spikes of more than 200
percent in Arizona and more than 180 percent in Kentucky. Two
months after the White House issued so-called gating criteria that
it recommended states hit before resuming business and social
activities, many states have moved forward despite not meeting all
the benchmarks. Only a handful of states — like Connecticut, New
Jersey, New York and South Dakota — are currently trending in the
right direction on measures like declining case count and robust
testing platforms, according to CovidExitStrategy.org.
Officials within Trump’s health department are strategizing over
how to convey the current level of risk, given data that Americans
have put off emergency care and other potential medical needs,
fearful of contracting Covid-19. “Our message now is that people
should start returning to their health care providers to get the
screenings, vaccines, care, or emergency services that they
need,†Laura Trueman, the HHS official in charge of external
affairs, wrote in an office-wide email to colleagues and shared
with external groups on June 3, which was obtained by POLITICO.
Dan Abel, a longtime Coast Guard vice admiral, also has been
installed at HHS with a small team, where he’s coordinating daily
Covid-19 calls with HHS Secretary Alex Azar and the department’s
division leaders, according to four officials with knowledge of the
calls — an arrangement that’s raised some questions.
“Why is a Coast Guard admiral leading meetings between the HHS
secretary and his senior staff?†asked one senior official,
suggesting it was creating an unnecessary layer of management.
Meanwhile, the department is steadily turning back to its many
pre-Covid-19 priorities. At the Food and Drug Administration,
officials are returning to hot-button issues like tobacco and CBD
regulations. Some staff in the health department’s emergency
response arm are pivoting away from Covid-19 and back toward
natural disasters as hurricane season begins.
At the same time, the CDC — traditionally the beating heart of
the nation’s infectious disease response — remains largely
demoralized and often sidelined in fighting what its director,
Robert Redfield, last week acknowledged as the nation’s biggest
health challenge in more than a century, and one he said is
“moving through our social consciousness, our outward expression,
and our grief.†That grim message has conflicted with Trump’s
frequent vows of victory over the coronavirus.
“We were able to close our country, save millions of lives,
open,†Trump
said in Friday’s Rose Garden remarks. “And now the
trajectory is great.â€
“I fully recognize the anguish our Nation is experiencing
& am deeply saddened by the many lives lost to COVID19,â€
Redfield tweeted
just minutes later. “I call upon the American people to remain
vigilant in protecting the vulnerable – protect your community,
grandparents and loved ones from COVID-19.â€
Redfield and other top officials also have spent the past week
reckoning with the implications of widespread protests over police
brutality, from meeting with staff to discuss longstanding concerns
about systemic racism in health care to acknowledging the
probability that those protests will spark new outbreaks.
HHS also on Monday sent members of Congress a fact sheet on its
response to racial disparities in Covid-19 care — a much
scrutinized issue in public health, with African Americans
contracting and dying from the virus at much higher rates.
But on Capitol Hill, watchdogs say that fact sheets don’t cut
it, and they’re frustrated by the lack of access to experts and
insight into how the administration is handling a historic
pandemic.
“Some are acting like the battle has been won when in reality
it’s just beginning,†said a senior Democratic staffer. “The
White House still won’t let task force members testify at
hearings in June even though they have disappeared from TV and
it’s not clear how often they are meeting.â€
Fauci, meanwhile, has continued to issue a string of dire
warnings in his lower-profile media appearances and at an industry
conference on Tuesday.
“We have something that turned out to be my worst nightmare,”
Fauci said in
virtual remarks aired at a conference of the biotech industry’s
Washington trade group, recounting how quickly the virus spread
around the globe, outpacing Ebola and HIV. “And it isn’t over
yet.â€
The White House has maintained that chief of staff Mark Meadows
has needed to clear officials like Fauci to testify, so they can
stay focused on other priorities, and a spokesperson insisted that
Trump has still prioritized the coronavirus fight even as the White
House shifts toward focusing on revitalizing the economy.
Several officials have suggested that the task force’s lower
profile has been helpful for the response, especially because the
daily Covid-19 press briefings were often hijacked by Trump’s
meandering remarks or the day’s other political news.
“In some ways, it actually has been easier to get
Covid-related work done,†said one HHS staffer who’s helped
support the Covid-19 response. “The task force briefings and the
prep sessions for them took up a lot of principals’ time, and
staff would sometimes have to crash on putting together materials
for them.â€
But the white-hot spotlight on the coronavirus also brought
urgency and intensity, and the increasingly scattered nature of the
current response could present new challenges if there’s an
uptick in cases.
“This is when a one-government approach is needed more now
than ever,†said Howard Koh, who served as President Barack
Obama’s HHS assistant secretary for health. “Get all those
people together in one room every day at the highest level and
track outcomes and address all the questions and try to maximize
coordination as much as possible.â€
Max Cohen, Adam Cancryn and David Lim contributed to this
report.
