According to an in-depth examination of the days that led up to the coronavirus exploding with full force in the U.S. that has now led to over 22,000 Americans dying, Rolling Stone reports that America is the victim of the "ignorance, arrogance and incompetence" of the Donald Trump's administration.
Using what have come to be known as the "Red Dawn" emails (reported by the New York Times) circulated amongst health care officials in the administration that contained early warnings that as many as 1.7 million Americans could die from the virus when it made its way to America, the report details what one official described as an "absolute clusterf*ck" in the Trump White House.
Noting, "The people on the Red Dawn email chain ranged from local health officials in Texas and California to senior-level doctors at the U.S. Army, the CDC, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the State Department," the report by Rolling Stone's Andy Kroll adds that pandemic expert Dr. Carter Mecher, now a senior adviser at the Department of Veterans Affairs was the first to raise a red flag back in late February.
Using a field report from Japan’s National Institute of Infectious Diseases about a cruise ship in Yokohama where the virus made an early appearance, Mecher made some quick calculations about the devastation that virus would cause if it made it to the U.S. with another member of the email chain warning the country was woefully unprepared.
"If those projections were even in the ballpark, a crisis of unimaginable proportions was fast approaching. Dr. Eva Lee, a health care operations expert at Georgia Tech, warned that there would likely be a critical shortage of personal protective equipment for nurses and doctors," Kroll wrote, noting that Lee emailed her colleagues: “I do not know if we have enough resources to protect all front-line providers.”
As the report states, those worries made it to the White House where one specialist informed government officials who were reportedly, "stunned to learn how grim the situation was — that it was too late to contain the virus, that mitigation was the only option, and that as many as half of all Americans could become infected."
Despite that, one high ranking White House official, Dr. Jerome Adams, the surgeon general and chief medical officer for the United States, downplayed the crisis despite being added to the Red Dawn mailing list, later saying he never saw the emails.
"A representative for Adams says the surgeon general didn’t see these emails, and in the days afterward, Adams downplayed the coronavirus threat, pointing out that “fried food” and “sitting on your couch” were more likely to lead to your death," Kroll wrote before adding, "But if Adams had read the emails, he would have read Mecher’s most dire warning yet."
"If you were to write a playbook for how not to prevent a public-health crisis, you would study the work of the Trump administration in the first three months of 2020," the author lectured. "The Trump White House, through some combination of ignorance, arrogance, and incompetence, failed to heed the warnings of its own experts. It failed to listen to the projections of one of its own economic advisers. It failed to take seriously what has become the worst pandemic since the 1918 flu and the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. And when the White House finally awoke to the seriousness of COVID-19, the response it mustered managed to contain all the worst traits of this presidency. Trump and his closest aides have ignored scientists, enlisted family members and TV personalities and corporate profiteers for help, and disregarded every protocol for how to communicate during a pandemic while spewing misinformation and lies."
According to the author, the Trump White House is "mired in petty politics and internal turf wars," and that agencies that should be working to stem the pandemic tide are being left out in the cold.
"The Trump administration’s reflexive bias against science and facts expertise couldn’t be clearer than in the sidelining of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the crown jewel of the country’s public-health system. Dr. Robert Redfield, the CDC’s director, sits on the Coronavirus Task Force and has participated in closed-door meetings, but he has appeared at only a few of the dozens of press briefings held by the task force. Trump trashed the agency on Twitter in mid-March (“inadequate and slow”), and the CDC has since taken a back seat to other federal agencies in communicating with the public," the report states.
According to Dr. Tom Frieden, who served as CDC director from 2009 to 2017, “I’m worried that the CDC is not front and center now. In every other public-health emergency in this country since the CDC was founded nearly 75 years ago, it has had a leading role. The CDC is the best source of information on COVID-19. Fighting coronavirus without CDC is like fighting with one hand behind your back.”
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