”’In the worst part of the battle, the general was missing in action,’ Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan said of the recent surge.” washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/…
“People are still dying every day. There’s thousands of cases every day and yet he won’t do the right thing.…To see a sitting president directly refuse to help during a crisis is just flabbergasting to me,” said Olivia Troye, a former Pence adviser. washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/…
“He’s a salesman, but this is something he can’t sell. So he just gave up. He gave up on trying to sell people something that was unsellable,” said Paul A. Offit, a professor of vaccinology at UPenn and a member of the FDA’s vaccine advisory council. washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/…
”Tucker Carlson flew to Mar-a-Lago in March on an urgent mission: convey the seriousness of the coronavirus threat. Carlson told Trump he could lose the election because of Covid, and Trump argued that the virus was less deadly than people were claiming.” washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/…
“[Kushner] was like, ‘I’m going to bring in my data and we’re going to MBA this to death and make it work,’ one senior official said. But problems quickly emerged…” One person Kushner brought in ”was so alarmed by what he witnessed he filed an anonymous whistleblower report.”
”Brad Smith, director of Centers for Medicaid & Medicare Services, asked for a Covid model that specifically projected a low casualty count. When the volunteer noted he had no training in epidemiology, Smith told him it’s just like making a financial model washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/…
“‘They think 250,000 people could die and I want this model to show that fewer than 100,000 people will die in the worst-case scenario,’ the volunteer said Brad Smith told him. ‘He gave us the numbers he wanted it to say.’” washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/…
“This pandemic is incredibly tragic and, as someone who was in the room, it was clear it wasn’t taken seriously. It was understood what measures could be taken to save lives, to reduce severity, and the administration & Kushner made an active choice not to pursue those actions.”
”Skepticism of masks became a hallmark of the Trump administration’s pandemic response. On April 3, when the CDC recommended that all Americans wear masks, Trump announced that he would not do so…instead he followed trusted aides to think of masks as a cultural wedge issue.”
“What the Trump administration has managed to do is they accomplished — remarkably — a very high-tech solution, which is developing a vaccine, but they completely failed at the low-tech solution, which is masking and social distancing, and they put people at risk,” Offit said.
”By late spring — after he infamously suggested people ingest bleach to cure themselves of the virus — Trump stopped appearing at coronavirus briefings. Meadows helped pull the plug. ‘He felt it was a loser message. So why message on covid?’” washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/…
”Atlas pushed a controversial ‘herd immunity’ strategy — of letting the virus spread freely among the young and healthy — and clashed with others on the task force. One senior adviser said, ‘The science just got totally perverted with Scott in the room.’” washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/…
”Privately, Atlas often argued his case more crudely, bluntly saying coronavirus was a disease that only affected the overweight, the diabetic and the elderly… But Trump liked Atlas and the shoddy science he was peddling. He ‘had a doctor title but a MAGA perspective.’”
“Dr Atlas caused people to lose their lives because he stood at the White House podium and told people masks may not work and we should get over it and build up herd immunity. He told the world lies from a bully pulpit, a position of power & I believe people died because of that”
“Birx would circulate her daily report, and more often than not, there would be no responses from anyone on the email. I remember there were times where she would flag something massive, like, we are within weeks of a massive remdesivir shortage, and no one would reply.”
”A consistent criticism of Pence was his reluctance to deliver tough news and dire statistics to the president. A Pence ally, however, said Pence always shared the daily reality with Trump but, as a perpetual optimist, often did so with a positive spin.” washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/…
”Pence also hosted holiday parties where pictures from one such event earlier this month showed hundreds of guests mingling mostly maskless underneath an enclosed tent. Even Pence himself, the head of the coronavirus task force, did not wear a mask.” washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/…
”At least one worker who got infected never heard from anyone in the White House about the illness. They were replaced for the next party.” washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/…
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