We have heard the excuses over and over again, “We didn’t want to panic the country.”
With over 750,000 dead later, perhaps just a bit of panic early on might have saved a lot of lives, especially coming from the Trump administration which, we presume, the MAGAs would have respected. But the Trump administration was not about to let that happen. They had an economy to protect and an election coming.
Thus, when the CDC started putting out accurate information and sounding an accurate alarm that might have saved lives, the White House stepped in, despite the fact that the CDC exists, in part, to get this information to the public.
According to Politico:
The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis has conducted interviews over the last several months about how former President Donald Trump and his closest confidantes, including former White House adviser Scott Atlas and son-in-law Jared Kushner, tried to steer the course of the federal response, sidestepping the interagency process.
This site reported time after time that Kushner’s strategy won the day inside the White House, move all messaging out of the CDC to the White House itself, put blame on blue state governors (early on it was a blue state problem) and take credit for any successes; “We do so much testing! We made so many ventilators…”
Now, the details as to who did what and when are coming to light:
On Friday, the committee released emails and transcripts with former senior CDC officials about the White House’s attempts to sideline the agency at critical moments at the beginning of the U.S. outbreak.
em>The emails and transcripts detail how in the early days of 2020 Trump and his allies in the White House blocked media briefings and interviews with CDC officials, attempted to alter public safety guidance normally cleared by the agency and instructed agency officials to destroy evidence that might be construed as political interference.
Destroying evidence might also be construed as a crime, were it not so far down the list of crimes that Kush and the rest of the administration allegedly committed during the term.
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