CNN scoops:
Yet there’s something uniquely ugly about how the White House is trying to spin away this new revelation. Because we’re likely to hear more of this, it’s worth engaging. Here’s what they’re saying:
“It is not inconsistent to acknowledge the threat posed by pandemics and posture the government to respond, and also acknowledge that this is a new or never seen before virus that came out of nowhere and was initially covered up by the Chinese Communist Party,” a senior administration official told CNN.
That’s narrowly true — those two things are not necessarily inconsistent on their faces. But as a defense, this is still preposterously dishonest.
The implication here is that the Trump administration did not react effectively enough both because this particular pandemic could not be anticipated and because China’s coverup somehow held them back from mounting an effective response.
But this is absurd. First, the fact that this pandemic is so destructive is not exonerating, since the whole point of these new revelations is that they show officials fully understood that a pandemic was a real possibility and that if one hit, it would be really terrible. It kept Azar up at night more than anything else did. So officials actually did warn of the very thing that is now being held up as the excuse for not heeding those warnings.
Second, the basic timeline blows up the spin that China’s coverup is somehow to blame.
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It’s true that Beijing tried to get away with a coverup in the early days. But this isn’t exonerating, either. Intelligence officials were reportedly tracking coronavirus, and sounding internal warnings about it, throughout the month of January, and around the time of the first confirmed case in the United States.
Azar himself has testified that officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention first learned of coronavirus directly from Chinese officials on Jan. 3.
Indeed, CNN’s revelations about Azar’s early concerns are particularly interesting — and damning — in light of other aspects of the timeline. As Politico reports, as early as mid-January, the HHS secretary urgently tried to warn Trump to take the coronavirus extremely seriously, but Trump’s aides “mocked and belittled Azar as alarmist.”
This shouldn’t need saying, but given that officials inside Trump’s own administration were sounding the alarm and understood the dire nature of the threat, the China excuse is absurd.
What’s more, the vast bulk of the catastrophic failures on the administration’s part, the ones that could have vastly mitigated the situation once it was upon us, occurred after the administration fully understood what was happening.
Trump regularly downplayed the threat for weeks and weeks as confirmed cases and deaths mounted. Some of this was because Trump feared rattling the markets — and harming his reelection chances.
Then came the massive failure to ramp up testing, which allowed the virus to rage out of control, and the failure to deploy federal power to secure needed lifesaving equipment in time to be prepared when cases swamped hospitals. All of that took place long after everyone knew what was happening.
Let’s make this simple. We know how to fight pandemics, having done it before. Many officials inside the government fully understood that a pandemic could come along, and that when it did, it would pose a dire threat. Many officials knew (and know) how to spot threats early. In fact, in this case, that actually happened.
What did not happen in spite of all these existing resources concerns the president of the United States. He did not take the general threat of pandemics seriously. He did not listen or act when officials actually spotted one. And he failed to listen for weeks as his own officials and many outside efforts screamed at him to treat it with urgency.
We don’t have to over-complicate this. That’s what happened. We’re now dealing with the consequences. They will get worse.
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