Dr. Anthony Fauci and former President Donald Trump at a coronavirus activity drive briefing on April 22, 2020.Drew Angerer/Getty Images
A House committee launched new proof that Trump officers interfered with the US’s COVID response.
Weakened CDC testing pointers and blocked CDC briefings have been amongst the committee’s findings.
The report additionally mentioned Trump “neglected the pandemic response” to “promote the Big Lie” of a stolen election.
A brand new report from the House Committee on Oversight and Reform — the essential investigative physique of the House of Representatives — discovered that the Trump administration undermined the nation’s COVID-19 pandemic response for political functions.
The report, first written about by CNN and performed below the auspices of the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis, consists of quite a few findings which have already been launched this 12 months. But the report additionally consists of new proof of what the committee known as “deliberate efforts to undermine the nation’s coronavirus response for political purposes.”
According to the report, the Trump administration additionally weakened COVID-19 testing pointers set by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) whereas blocking media briefings by the public well being company.
After a February 25, 2020 briefing through which then-CDC National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases Director Dr. Nancy Messonnier warned about the risks of the virus, former President Donald Trump was angered and blocked the well being company’s requests to conduct public briefings for three months.
“That is the feeling that we had, many of us had,” mentioned Dr. Anne Schuchat, a CDC official, when requested by the committee about whether or not she and others at the company felt “muzzled” by the administration.
Dr. Deborah Birx, who served as the White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator below Trump, wrote in an electronic mail launched by the committee that she could be skipping a gathering that included many proponents of a “herd immunity” response to the pandemic.
“I can’t be part of this with these people who believe in herd immunity,” Birx wrote in an August 2020 electronic mail to Marc Short, then the chief of employees to Vice President Mike Pence. “They are a fringe group without grounding in epidemics, public health or on the ground common sense experience.”
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The report additionally discovered that Trump administration officers “neglected the pandemic response to focus on the 2020 presidential election and promote the Big Lie that the election results were fraudulent.”
“The narrow focus on campaigning ‘took people’s time away from and distracted them away from the pandemic,'” learn the committee’s abstract of Birx’s remarks.
The full report may be discovered right here.
Read the authentic article on Business Insider
