There was only one story worth coverage in our politics as the week began. The story was that, for four years, the United States of America, the world’s oldest democracy, was governed by monsters, and that a substantial portion of the population seems to want some of the monsters back. These were death-dealing scum who dealt their death on their own people and then, having dealt death far and wide for their own cheap political purposes, they covered up what they did, also for their own cheap political purposes. I have no illusions about what other American administrations have done. Nobody my age does. But there’s an element of penny-ante nihilism behind the events of 2017-2021 that make the death dealt by that administration* look more casual and, therefore, infinitely more cruel.
Politico looked through emails and documents released by the House Select Committee on the Coronavirus Crisis and found a stunning amount of evidence that arraigns the previous administration* for its moral responsibility in hundreds of thousands of deaths.
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. The documents further underscore how Trump appointees tried to undermine the work of scientists and career staff at the CDC to control the administration’s messaging on the spread of the virus and the dangers of transmission and infection.
The previous administration* gagged its own scientists, buried its own reports, bullied its own agencies, soft-pedaled its own data, and created its own reality to sell to the country, all at a crucial time when the pandemic could have been fought seriously and at least partly arrested.
Christine Casey, one of the leaders of the CDC team that publishes weekly scientific reports, also known as Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports, told the House committee that at one point in August 2020 she received instructions to delete an email reflecting political interference.
Casey said Paul Alexander, the former temporary senior policy adviser to the assistant secretary for public affairs at HHS, instructed her to stop publishing the weekly reports, insinuating her team was trying to make Trump look bad in public. After conversations with leadership at the CDC, including then-Director Robert Redfield, Michael Iademarco, one of the CDC’s leaders overseeing epidemiology and laboratory services, told Casey to delete the email.
“I believe he said that the director [Redfield] said to delete the email and that anyone else who had received it, you know, should do as well,” Casey said in her testimony.
One particularly egregious example involves the country’s meatpacking industry, which was slammed by the pandemic early on. The workers in that industry were largely poor, many of them were of questionable immigration status, and those circumstances made them vulnerable to being forced into dangerous conditions by their employers. This made some people curious as to why the Centers for Disease Control were not sending out specific guidance to that specific industry.
In an April 2020 email released by the committee Friday, then-Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought emailed Redfield, raising questions about why the CDC was not planning to send public health guidance on meatpacking plants through the White House. At the time, the White House was at odds with CDC about what steps meatpacking plants should take to protect workers from contracting Covid-19. The virus had infected several plants in the Midwest, causing disruptions to workflow.
Also disruptions to some workers’ lifeflows, by making them dead.
“Bob-Your team (Kyle McGowan) is saying that they are not going to send the meat packing guidance through the normal OIRA channel in order to serve Taskforce. We need to make sure it comes in as normal to run our clearance process,” Vought wrote. At the urging of top White House officials, including Marc Short, former chief of staff to Vice President Mike Pence, Redfield softened the language of the guidance.
The sheer contempt for active national leadership and the sheer disregard for the public health illustrated by this material has no parallel in American history. For the sake of their own public image—which, ironically, was headed for the storm drain anyway—members of the administration* abandoned even their most rudimentary obligations as public servants. The country was denied the information it desperately needed because some time-servers and coat-holders were trying to avoid a tantrum from the Oval Office. We are lucky we survived this long.
Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.
