Tag: Trump botched COVID-19 response killed over 560 thousand Americans

Feuds, fibs and finger-pointing: Trump officials say coronavirus response was worse than known

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‘That’s what bothers me every day’: Birx and others admit failures that hampered the White House response

Several top doctors in the Trump administration offered their most pointed and direct criticism of the government response to the coronavirus last year, with one of them arguing that hundreds of thousands of covid-19 deaths could have been prevented.

They also admitted their own missteps as part of a CNN special that aired Sunday night, saying that some Trump administration statements the White House fiercely defended last year were misleading or outright falsehoods.

“When we said there were millions of tests available, there weren’t, right?” said Brett Giroir, who served as the nation’s coronavirus testing czar, referencing the administration’s repeated claims in March 2020 that anyone who sought a coronavirus test could get one. “There were components of the test available, but not the full meal deal.” Continue reading.

‘Breathtaking’ interviews show Trump was ‘impervious’ to pleas to take pandemic seriously: NYT’s Haberman

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New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman on Monday described recent CNN interviews with former Trump public health officials as “breathtaking,” and said it showed how many of them were frustrated by their inability to get former President Donald Trump to take the coronavirus pandemic seriously.

While appearing on CNN, Haberman said that Dr. Deborah Birx and other former Trump health officials were now speaking freely after being muzzled for much of the past year.

“I think they wanted to peel off the muzzle,” she said. “I think it spoke to their frustration about what happened, spoke to their feelings on their own part, could they have done more, was there something else that could have been done… It’s breathtaking how quickly this happened.” Continue reading.

Birx tells CNN most U.S. covid deaths ‘could have been mitigated’ after first 100,000

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Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator under President Donald Trump, said most coronavirus deaths in the United States could have been prevented if the Trump administration had acted earlier and more decisively.

Birx made her comments in the CNN documentary “Covid War: The Pandemic Doctors Speak Out,” a clip from which the network released Saturday. The full documentary will air 9 p.m. Sunday.

In it, CNN chief medical correspondent Sanjay Gupta asked Birx how much of a difference she thinks it would have made had the United States “mitigated earlier, … paused earlier and actually done it,” referring to extending shutdowns, urging people to wear masks and implementing other steps to slow the spread of the virus. Continue reading.