Standing outside one among the most buildings on the University of Connecticut campus last week, Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus task force coordinator, let loose an exasperated sigh through her peach-colored mask.
Birx had been traveling almost non-stop since June, working with local and state officials to develop area-specific strategies for slowing the spread of the highly contagious virus. Connecticut was her 32nd state and, as within the others, she was peppered there with questions on the mixed messaging stemming from the White House.
Seemingly frustrated by the very fact that 200,000 deaths later, there was still uncertainty about the federal government’s COVID-19 prevention strategy, Birx paused before laying out, yet again, her broken-record response: Wear a mask, wash your hands, and stay socially distanced. Wear a mask, wash hands, social distance.
“We are ready to give our greatest public-health and scientific advice to leadership and... I still do this a day whether it's the governor, whether it's the president, or whether it's members of the community. The consistency of that message is completely key,” Birx said. Pressed again on whether masks were necessary, the task force leader rolled her eyes: “Let me make it clear: we all know how effective these are in blocking our droplets. It’s not just theoretic[al].”
Birx’s frustration may are months within the making. But the context was unavoidable. Just days prior, President Trump had returned home from Reed center and, still infected with the virus, triumphantly removed his mask on the balcony of the White House for prime-time television.
It was a move directly at odds with the caution that Birx et al. are pitching. But while she may have seemed irritated by it all, she was hardly the sole high-ranking health official indicating that they’re at their wits’ end with Trump.
After months of trying to avoid direct run-ins with the president, task force officials are not any longer tiptoeing around his demands. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Health and communicable disease , has for weeks spoken out against Scott Atlas—a neuroradiologist who has no experience handling infectious diseases but has become Trump’s coronavirus guru by feeding his desire for positive news—for “cherry-picking data.” More recently, he’s railed against the Trump campaign for “harassing” him in their ads.
Robert Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has gone after Atlas also , claiming “everything he says is false;” the CDC has pushed back against the White House’s preference to not recommend testing asymptomatic individuals. And despite demands by the White House that they continue to be covert , guidelines for COVID-19 vaccine-makers that might make a release before the election virtually impossible were published last week by the Federal Drug Administration.
Asked for comment about the increasing frustration among officials, White House spokesperson Brian Morgenstern didn't directly speak to the task force tensions and instead said, “President Trump’s top priority is that the health and safety of the American people.”
Morgenstern did acknowledge that Trump sometimes disagrees with task force officials “in straightness .” But prior administration officials say such crosscurrents and rebukes from senior health officials are basically unprecedented . and that they point to a growing rebellion among the ranks of the president’s coronavirus task force right at an increasingly precarious moment: the beginning of the autumn season when cases are on the increase .
“In prior emergencies with which Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx are through, there are better and worse responses, but they’ve all shared some fundamental basic competence. The plain fact is that the administration’s response to COVID has lacked basic competence,” said Tom Frieden, former director for the CDC for the Obama administration. “It’s true today there's no national plan, no clear organization, we’re not on an equivalent page and there’s a failure to speak . There has not been consistent messaging from the federal . Plus, there has been a politicization of mask-wearing and a scarcity of discipline in brooding about when to shut and what to open. It’s mind-boggling.”
The relationship between Trump and his COVID advisers has always been fraught. The president painted a rosy scenario about the fight against the virus since it arrived in America. He’s openly pushed for reopening the country on an expedited time-frame . He’s accused career scientists of plotting against him by dragging their feet on a vaccine. And he’s improvised about the efficacy of therapies and coverings in ways bordering, experts say, on the irresponsible.
But the frictions became particularly pronounced in recent weeks, after the White House hosted what Fauci called a superspreader event and because the election has neared.
“I think, genuinely, both Redfield and Birx want to try to to good,” said Zeke Emanuel, a former health policy adviser to the Obama administration. “But trying to work out the way to benefit during this administration has been complex for them.”
With Trump increasingly turning to Atlas for guidance, Birx, Fauci, and Redfield have all been sidelined from the task force. In recent interviews, Fauci has explicitly said that the task force isn’t even meeting as often because it did, sometimes once every week . Birx has been on the road, participating only in local media interviews. Redfield, meanwhile, has participated in virtually zero media appearances after a recent series of run-ins with the White House over mask-wearing, testing and faculty reopening guidelines, whilst the previous director of the CDC, William Foege, sent a public letter urging him to “stand up to a bully.”
But as they’ve slipped faraway from the limelight, the trio et al. are more adamant in holding their ground on policy disputes. And for those that are within the bureaucratic trenches at the intersection of politics and health policy, it’s been something of a pleasing surprise to ascertain the absence of acquiescence.
“I have tons of respect for Deborah Birx and that i think she does have an understanding of what must be done. i feel she does do her best to travel out and explain those messages. Because the science isn't that complicated anymore,” said Andy Slavitt, Obama’s former director of the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services. “I suspect she seems like it’s important for her to be there and she or he views herself as a public-health warrior. But i feel there's a limited amount that they will do without the support of their boss. in order that they need to cope with the one that sits within the Oval Office . i feel she’s facing those very consequences but she’s doing what maybe the foremost productive thing she will .”
Fewer people on the task force are more openly defiant of Trump in recent days than Fauci. The revered infectious-disease expert has not shied faraway from issuing dire warnings about the present course the disease is taking. But he’s also been much more willing to dispense with the sort of diplomatic niceties that marked his public utterances about the president and therefore the White House during the pandemic’s early months.
In an interview with The Daily Beast in September, Fauci cast doubt on the president’s timeline that a COVID-19 vaccine was just round the corner and pointed to a big lack of trust within the vaccine process. In another interview with the Beast on Monday, he took his biggest jab yet at Trump and his campaign, demanding that they refrain from using him in future campaign ads.
“By doing this against my will they're , in effect, harassing me,” Fauci said. “Since campaign ads are about getting votes, their harassment of me may need the other effect of turning some voters off.”
While a part of the friction may stem from the task force’s continued difficulty in getting the pandemic in check , officials working with the administration say much of it's caused by Trump, whose attention to and understanding of the virus has always been a source of frustration.
“As the election heated , it got harder to urge him to specialise in the rules and data that we believed to be most vital to saving lives,” said a senior administration official who works with the White House task force. “That remains the case now. it's been known that if you’re bringing something to him that isn’t likely to assist his re-election or get the economy open [to his liking] again, then you would possibly also not be presenting it to the president in the least .”
That sentiment was underscored Monday night, when Trump returned to the campaign trail, at a Sanford, Florida, rally, for the primary major event of its kind since he was hospitalized. On stage, he cracked jokes about his perceived “immunity” from the virus, how he’d “kiss all therein audience,” including “all the blokes and therefore the beautiful women,” and continued calling for the fast reopening of the U.S. economy to “get our country rolling.”
To veterans of the coronavirus task force turned critics of the president, it had been a mere extension of the unserious manner during which he’s addressed the emergency since Day 1.
Olivia Troye, a former senior adviser for the task force who left in August and has since endorsed 2020 Democratic nominee Joe Biden, recounted how the president would show up to coronavirus meetings and repeatedly ask things like, “Is this worse than the flu?” and “Children aren’t affected, right?” only to be told that children could indeed be affected.
“[He] would quite nod along, on the other hand he’d leave publicly and say the other , anyway. this is able to happen all the time, and it had been infuriating,” she said. “Dr. Fauci would tell the vice chairman and a few of the president’s senior staff that children might be major spreaders of it because the info is inconclusive, only to ascertain the administration and Trump completely disregard it, over and once again .”
Troye recalled that in some meetings with members of the COVID task force earlier this year, the president would normally get distracted and instead “want to speak about media that had pissed him off.”
“At times, he would go around [the room] and spend his time complimenting people for his or her [recent TV] appearances. He’d compliment Kellyanne Conway, or someone, on how well he thought someone did, saying, ‘Oh, you probably did an excellent job thereon today!’” she added. “This was [during meetings] once we were trying to urge him to specialise in matters of life and death round the country.”
Conway didn't return an invitation for comment.
That task force members are now more forcefully pushing back against Trump doesn’t strike some as a surprise. except for other onlookers, kudos aren't exactly earned at this juncture. The time for speaking out and pushing back, they say, should are months ago.
“I think apart from Fauci, they're still not speaking out or speaking the reality to the American people,” said Leslie Datch, who ran the Ebola response at the Department of Health and Human Services during the Obama administration. “I think Trump bringing COVID-19 into the White House, the intensifying epidemic round the country, and Trump’s doubling down on his craziness after his illness, has shown them that he will never do the proper thing. Any glimmer of hope or sanity has been removed. If you've got any fidelity to the reality , to the Hippocratic oath , or to the principles you tell yourself and your family are important... it’s become impossible to stay silent and be complicit.”
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