Why even Debbie Birx got sidelined

And you easily guess: she wasn't sycophantic enough.

An internal memo from Deborah Birx that circulated among top officials in President Trump's administration pokes holes in the his claim that the country is "rounding the corner" in the fight against the coronavirus and soon will have defeated it.

"We are entering the most concerning and most deadly phase of this pandemic ... leading to increasing mortality," Birx said Monday in a memo reported by The Washington Post. "This is not about lockdowns — It hasn’t been about lockdowns since March or April. It’s about an aggressive balanced approach that is not being implemented."

[...]

The Monday memo specifically referenced Trump's recent campaign rallies, many of which have involved little social distancing or mask-wearing by attendees.

[...]

A top administration official told the Post that Birx has become increasingly frustrated by what she has characterized as feeling "ignored" by White House officials as she and others have warned against a potentially deadly second and third wave of the virus this fall and winter.

  The Hill

Trying to recover her reputation.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

How long till Birx is out?

President Trump on Monday publicly criticized Deborah Birx, the doctor who is coordinating the White House’s coronavirus response, suggesting she was hurting him after she bluntly acknowledged that the pandemic is widespread across the United States.

Trump targeted Birx over a weekend response to criticism from Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who questioned Birx’s credibility in responding to the pandemic. He appeared to call Birx’s response to Pelosi’s criticism “pathetic.”

“So Crazy Nancy Pelosi said horrible things about Dr. Deborah Birx, going after her because she was too positive on the very good job we are doing on combatting the China Virus, including Vaccines & Therapeutics,” Trump tweeted. “In order to counter Nancy, Deborah took the bait & hit us. Pathetic!”

  The Hill

I have the perfect job for Trump when he leaves office: scorekeeper. Preferably in another country.

The tweet was even more jarring given White House officials had just spent the weekend praising Birx and defending her in the wake of Pelosi’s sniping.

He constantly undermines his own people.

“I have tremendous respect for the Speaker. And I have tremendous respect for her long dedication to the American people,” Birx said Sunday on CNN when asked about Pelosi’s comments, defending her data-driven approach to the pandemic.

Birx also delivered a sober warning of the current threat posed by the coronavirus, saying the United States had entered a “new phase” in its battle against the virus and calling it “extraordinarily widespread.” p “What we are seeing today is different from March and April. It is extraordinarily widespread ... it’s more widespread and it’s both rural and urban,” Birx said on CNN.

“To everybody who lives in a rural area, you are not immune or protected from this virus,” Birx continued. “And that is why we keep saying, no matter where you live in America, you need to wear a mask and socially distance, do the personal hygiene pieces.”

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Dear God

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Short history of the Trump coronavirus failure (to date)

Over a critical period beginning in mid-April, President Trump and his team convinced themselves that the outbreak was fading, that they had given state governments all the resources they needed to contain its remaining “embers” and that it was time to ease up on the lockdown.

[...]

For scientific affirmation, they turned to Dr. Deborah L. Birx, the sole public health professional in the [White House coronavirus advice group, and response coordinator of the coronavirus task force]. A highly regarded infectious diseases expert, she was a constant source of upbeat news for the president and his aides, walking the halls with charts emphasizing that outbreaks were gradually easing.

[...]

On April 11, she told the coronavirus task force in the Situation Room that the nation was in good shape. Boston and Chicago are two weeks away from the peak, she cautioned, but the numbers in Detroit and other hard-hit cities are heading down.

[...]

Mr. Trump’s bet that the crisis would fade away proved wrong. But an examination of the shift in April and its aftermath shows that the approach he embraced was not just a misjudgment. Instead, it was a deliberate strategy that he would stick doggedly to as evidence mounted that, in the absence of strong leadership from the White House, the virus would continue to infect and kill large numbers of Americans.

[...]

Key elements of the administration’s strategy were formulated [...] by aides who for the most part had no experience with public health emergencies and were taking their cues from the president. Officials in the West Wing saw the better-known White House coronavirus task force as dysfunctional, came to view Dr. Fauci as a purveyor of dire warnings but no solutions and blamed officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for mishandling the early stages of the virus.

[...]

Mr. Trump’s bizarre public statements, his refusal to wear a mask and his pressure on states to get their economies going again left governors and other state officials scrambling to deal with a leadership vacuum.

[...]

Not until early June did White House officials even begin to recognize that their assumptions about the course of the pandemic had proved wrong. Even now there are internal divisions over how far to go in having officials publicly acknowledge the reality of the situation.

[...]

By mid-April, Mr. Trump had grown publicly impatient with the stay-at-home recommendations he had reluctantly endorsed.

[...]

At the meetings in [Chief of Staff Mark] Meadows’s office, the issue was clear: How much longer do we keep this up?

To answer that, they focused on two more questions: Had the virus peaked? And had the government given the states the tools they needed to manage the remaining problems?

On the first question, Dr. Birx and [Kevin A. Hassett, a top economic adviser,] were optimistic: Mitigation was working, they insisted, even as many outside experts were warning that the nation would remain at great risk if it let up on social distancing and moved prematurely to reopen.

[...]

If the point was to sustain a monthlong lockdown, the numbers told them, the administration succeeded. If it was to squelch the virus to containable levels, later events would show the officials were oblivious to how widely it was already spreading.

The members of his group believed they had succeeded on the second question, too, although shortages of protective gear continued in some places (and would flare again months later).

[...]

The group thought governors should no longer have trouble getting what they needed for hospitals, doctors and first responders. And they grew increasingly frustrated by what they saw as politically motivated complaining about a lack of federal help and the inability of some states to make effective use of the supplies they were receiving.

[...]

On April 14, the country passed what the group saw as a milestone, administering its three millionth test. Inside the West Wing, [Jared] Kushner was insistent on that point: Given their assumption that infections would not surge again until the fall, there was enough testing ability out there.

Those outside experts who disagreed were largely brushed off. In mid-April, Dr. Ashish K. Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, urged a top administration official to embrace his call for conducting 500,000 coronavirus tests a day — far more than was happening at the time.

The official, Adm. Brett P. Giroir, the administration’s testing czar, who had been delivering upbeat descriptions of the nation’s growing testing capacity, eventually conceded to Dr. Jha that his plan seemed to be needed. But he made clear the federal government was not prepared to get there quickly.

“At some point down the road,” is what Dr. Jha said Admiral Giroir told him.

  NYT

His plan was needed, but they weren't going to implement it - until "some point down the road." How does that make any sense at all?

On April 10, Mr. Trump declared that, in his role as something akin to a “wartime president,” it would be his decision about whether to reopen the country. “That’s my metrics,” he told reporters, pointing to his own head.

[...]

Three days later, he reiterated his responsibility. “When somebody is the president of the United States, the authority is total and that’s the way it’s got to be,” he said.

The next day, Dr. Birx and Dr. Fauci presented Mr. Trump with a plan for issuing guidelines to start reopening the country at the end of the month. Developed largely by Dr. Birx and held closely by her until being presented to the president — most task force members did not see them beforehand — the guidelines laid out broad, voluntary standards for states considering how fast to come out of the lockdown.

[...]

On April 16, when Mr. Trump publicly announced the guidelines, he made the message to the governors explicit.

“You’re going to call your own shots,” he said. Their critics notwithstanding, White House officials came to feel that they had in fact accomplished their job: giving governors the tools they needed to deal with remaining outbreaks as infections ebbed.

The wind down of the federal government’s response would play out over the next several weeks. The daily briefings with Mr. Trump ended on April 24. The Meadows team started barring Dr. Fauci from making most television appearances, lest he go off message and suggest continued high risk from the virus.

[...]

By June the president was regularly making nonsensical statements like, “If we stop testing right now, we’d have very few cases, if any.”

[...]

Inside the White House, Dr. Birx was the chief evangelist for the idea that the threat from the virus was fading.

Unlike Dr. Fauci, Dr. Birx is a strong believer in models that forecast the course of an outbreak. Dr. Fauci has cautioned that “models are only models” and that real-world outcomes depend on how people respond to calls for changes in behavior — to stay home, for example, or wear masks in public — sacrifices that required a sense of shared national responsibility.

[...]

In his decades of responding to outbreaks, Dr. Fauci, a voracious reader of political histories, learned to rely on reports from the ground. Late at night in his home office this spring, Dr. Fauci, who declined to comment for this article, dialed health officials in New Orleans, New York and Chicago, where he heard desperation unrecognizable in the more sanguine White House meetings.

[...]

As the pandemic worsened, Dr. Fauci’s darker view of the circumstances was countered by the reassurances ostensibly offered by Dr. Birx’s data.

[...]

There were warnings that the models [Birx] studied might not be accurate, especially in predicting the course of the virus against a backdrop of evolving political, economic and social factors. Among the models Dr. Birx relied on most was one produced by researchers at the University of Washington. But when Mr. Hassett reviewed its performance by looking back on its predictions from three weeks earlier, it turned out to be hit or miss.

The authors of the University of Washington model spoke to Dr. Birx or members of her team almost daily, they said, and often cautioned that their work was only supposed to offer a snapshot based on key assumptions, like people continuing to abide by social distancing until June 1.

[...]

Colorado health officials wrote to the administration on April 10, pleading that the White House not use the model to allocate supplies to the state, saying its predictions were rosier than the grim reality they were encountering. (When those concerns were relayed to her, Dr. Birx replied that decisions on allocating equipment were based on factors beyond the one model.)

Yeah. Like who is a Democrat and who is a Republican - who does Trump want to punish?

[D]espite the outside warnings and evidence by early May that new infections, while down, remained higher than anticipated, the White House never fundamentally re-examined the course it had set in mid-April.

[...]

Dr. Fauci, a friend of Dr. Birx’s for 30 years, would describe her as more political than him, a “different species.” More pessimistic by nature, Dr. Fauci privately warned that the virus was going to be difficult to control, often commenting that he was the “skunk at the garden party.”

By contrast, Dr. Birx regularly delivered what the new team was hoping for.

“All metros are stabilizing,” she would tell them, describing the virus as having hit its “peak” around mid-April. The New York area accounted for half of the total cases in the country, she said. The slope was heading in the right direction. “We’re behind the worst of it.” She endorsed the idea that the death counts and hospitalization numbers could be inflated.

[...]

She routinely told colleagues that the United States was on the same trajectory as Italy, which had huge spikes before infections and deaths flattened to close to zero.

“She said we were basically going to track Italy,” one senior adviser later recalled.

Dr. Birx would roam the halls of the White House, talking to Mr. Kushner, Ms. Hicks and others, sometimes passing out diagrams to bolster her case. “We’ve hit our peak,” she would say, and that message would find its way back to Mr. Trump.

Dr. Birx began using versions of the phrase “putting out the embers,” wording that was later picked up by the press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, and by Mr. Trump himself.

By the middle of May, the task force believed that another resurgence was not likely until the fall.

[...]

But the models and analysis embraced by the West Wing failed to account for the weakening adherence to the lockdowns across the country that began even before Mr. Trump started urging governors to “liberate” their residents from the methodical guidelines his own government had established.

[...]

Dr. Birx’s belief that the United States would mirror Italy turned out to be disastrously wrong. The Italians had been almost entirely compliant with stay-at-home orders and social distancing, squelching new infections to negligible levels before the country slowly reopened. Americans, by contrast, began backing away by late April from what social distancing efforts they had been making, egged on by Mr. Trump.

[...]

The real-world consequences of Mr. Trump’s abdication of responsibility rippled across the country.

During a briefing on April 20, Mr. Trump mocked Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland, a fellow Republican, for the state’s inability to find enough testing. Dr. Birx displayed maps with dozens of dots indicating labs that could help.

[...]

But when Frances B. Phillips, the state’s deputy health secretary, reached out to one of those dots — a National Institutes of Health facility in Maryland — she was told that they were suffering from the same shortages as state labs and were not in a position to help.

“It was clear that we were on our own and we need to develop our own strategy, which is very unlike the kind of federal response in the past public health emergencies,” Ms. Phillips recalled.

[...]

After offering to help acquire 350,000 testing swabs during an early morning conversation with one of [California Governor Gavin] Newsom’s advisers, Mr. Kushner made it clear that the federal help would hinge on the governor doing him a favor.

Gee, how long ago was that impeachment? You know, where it was stressed that letting Trump get away with demanding a quid pro quo from Ukraine could lead to him demanding it of American states? Seems like eons, but it was about six months.

“The governor of California, Gavin Newsom, had to call Donald Trump, and ask him for the swabs” [and publicly thank him] recalled the adviser, Bob Kocher, an Obama-era White House health care official.

Mr. Newsom made the call as requested and then praised Mr. Trump that same day during a news conference where he announced the commitment, giving Mr. Trump credit for the “substantial increase in supply” headed to California.

[...]

Other nations had moved aggressively to employ an array of techniques that Mr. Trump never mobilized on a federal level, including national testing strategies and contact tracing to track down and isolate people who had interacted with newly diagnosed patients.

“These things were done in Germany, in Italy, in Greece, Vietnam, in Singapore, in New Zealand and in China,” said Andy Slavitt, a former federal health care official who had been advising the White House.

“They were not secret,” he said. “Not mysterious. And these were not all wealthy countries. They just took accountability for getting it done. But we did not do that here."

[...]

By early June, it was clear that the White House had gotten it wrong.

[...]

Digging into new data from Dr. Birx, they concluded the virus was in fact spreading with invisible ferocity during the weeks in May when states were opening up with Mr. Trump’s encouragement and many were all but declaring victory.

With the benefit of hindsight, the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Robert R. Redfield, acknowledged this week in a conversation with the Journal of the American Medical Association that administration officials — himself included — severely underestimated infections in April and May. He estimated they were missing as many as 10 cases each day for every one they were confirming.

[...]

On Thursday, there were more than 75,000 confirmed new cases, a record.

[...]

Mr. Trump’s disdain for testing continues to affect the country. By the middle of June, lines stretched for blocks in Phoenix and in Austin, Texas. And getting results could take a week to 10 days, officials in Texas said — effectively inviting the virus to spread uncontrollably.

Dr. Mandy K. Cohen, the top health official in North Carolina, contacted the Trump administration after a surge in June, asking the government to quickly open 100 new testing sites in her state, in addition to the 13 it was then operating.

“We will keep those 13 open for another month — you are welcome,” Dr. Cohen said, mocking the response she received.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

The Trump administration focus

Trump and some of his advisers are prioritizing the psychology of the pandemic as much as, if not more than, plans to combat the virus, some aides and outside advisers said — striving to instill confidence that people can comfortably return to daily life despite the rising death toll.

[...]

On Friday, as the unemployment rate reached a historically high 14.7 percent, Trump urged Americans to think of this period as a “transition to greatness,” adding during a meeting with Republican members of Congress: “We’re going to do something very fast, and we’re going to have a phenomenal year next year.”

  WaPo

There goes "Keep America Great" as a campaign slogan.

The president predicted the virus eventually would disappear even without a vaccine — a prediction at odds with his own science officials.

[...]

Some of Trump’s advisers described the president as glum and shell-shocked by his declining popularity.

I'm surprised he sees it.

In private conversations, he has struggled to process how his fortunes suddenly changed from believing he was on a glide path to reelection to realizing that he is losing to the likely Democratic nominee, former vice president Joe Biden, in virtually every poll, including his own campaign’s internal surveys, advisers said. He also has been fretting about the possibility that a bad outbreak of the virus this fall could damage his standing in the November election.

But hasn't connected the dots, apparently, that doing something about the virus takes priority over doing something about the economy if he doesn't want "a bad outbreak" this fall.

The president is also eager to resume political travel in June, including holding his signature rallies by the end of the summer in areas where there are few cases, advisers said. Trump’s political team has begun discussions about organizing a high-dollar, in-person fundraiser next month, as well as preliminary planning about staging rallies and what sort of screenings might be necessary, according to Republican National Committee officials and outsider advisers. One option being considered is holding rallies outdoors, rather than in enclosed arenas, a senior administration official said.

And the problem with that? Oh, yeah...wind on his hair. MAGAhat, dude. It could read, "Transition to greatness."

Actually, social distancing outdoors would make his crowds look bigger, because they'd cover more ground, whereas social distancing in arenas will look like there wasn't much demand for tickets.

Stephen Moore, a conservative economist who has been informally advising Trump and his team, said making people comfortable returning to work and resuming normal activities will take a long time.

“I’m the biggest advocate for getting the economy up and running there is, but I have two relatives who think I’m crazy, and they’re not going out of their house no matter what,” Moore said. “Just because the president and governors open up a state doesn’t mean that commerce is going to instantly resume. It’s not.”

Bingo.

During a task force meeting Wednesday, a heated discussion broke out between Deborah Birx, the physician who oversees the administration’s coronavirus response, and Robert Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Birx and others were frustrated with the CDC’s antiquated system for tracking virus data, which they worried was inflating some statistics — such as mortality rate and case count — by as much as 25 percent, according to four people present for the discussion or later briefed on it. Two senior administration officials said the discussion was not heated.

“There is nothing from the CDC that I can trust,” Birx said, according to two of the people.

Inflating the count? That seems highly unlikely.

The flare-up came two days after it was reported that an internal government model, based on data from the CDC and other agencies, projected the daily death count would rise to 3,000 by June 1.

Yikes. Is that with or without reopening?

Birx said in a statement: “Mortality is slowly declining each day. To keep with this trend, it is essential that seniors and those with comorbidities shelter in place and that we continue to protect vulnerable communities.”

Where is she getting her data?

That assertion is contrary to Johns Hopkins data, which shows U.S. daily deaths hovering close to 2,000 most days for several weeks now, and climbing higher some days last week. Many experts also believe coronavirus deaths are actually being undercounted, with mortality data showing that U.S. deaths soared in the early weeks of pandemic, far beyond the number attributed to covid-19.

During the same meeting, the group also found itself in a robust debate over remdesivir, an experimental drug some administration officials are optimistic could help treat patients with covid-19. Robert Kadlec, assistant health secretary for preparedness and response, said the government had shipped remdesivir to seven states — an announcement that surprised Birx and others, who felt it was premature because they had not yet determined which states needed the drug most.

The next day, Vice President Pence, who oversees the administration’s coronavirus task force, grew frustrated when he asked for an update on distributing the drug and no one — including Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar — was able to provide one, saying discussions were still ongoing.

Running smoothly, as always.

“I think we’re in a really good position now to be able to look around the corner and set ourselves up for the fall,” said Katie Miller, Pence’s press secretary.

Katie Miller, who has covid-19.

"Setting themselves up for the fall," is exactly what they're doing.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Birx blinking out an SOS

She's considering the ramifications of her reputation being forever tied to this idiot.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Birx is not to be trusted

All the insane Dear Leader praise coming from the Trump administration (and GOP congress) is getting to be North Korea level. Disturbing.

Sit down, Debbie.  We've already seen your credibility tanked.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Oh, Jesus

Here we go again.

Google is not working with the US government in building a nationwide website to help people determine whether and how to get a novel coronavirus test, despite what President Donald Trump said in the course of issuing an emergency declaration for the coronavirus pandemic. Instead, a much smaller trial website made by another division of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, is going up. It will only be able to direct people to testing facilities in the Bay Area.

  The Verge

And that damned woman stood up there with a fucking chart touting it.

What is WRONG with these people?

Carolyn Wang, communications lead for Verily, told The Verge that the “triage website” was initially only going to be made available to health care workers instead of the general public. Now that it has been announced the way it was, however, anybody will be able to visit it, she said. But the tool will only be able to direct people to “pilot sites” for testing in the Bay Area, though Wang says Verily hopes to expand it beyond California “over time.”

The triage site should be put live within a few days, and it will be hosted at Project Baseline, the Verily website where people can sign up to take part in clinical trials. That’s a seemingly odd place for the triage tool to live, but Wang says that Project Baseline already has certain necessary tools like an informed consent agreement, so it makes sense to put it there.

[...]

In all, the difference between the reality of what is being built and what was promised during the press conference is very large.

Debbie Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, showed a flowchart during the press conference that explained what the proposed functionality of the website would be. Nobody from Alphabet or Google spoke at the event, although may executives from other health and retail companies did.

As Birx described the website, citizens would be able to enter their symptoms and, depending on what the results are, be directed to a “drive thru” testing facility. That same website would apparently also be where people can go to find their results.

So are the drive-through testing sites they touted actually happening?

Jesus wept.

UPDATE 3/31: This explains a lot: Jared Kushner was in charge of this, and his brother is co-founder of the company that was to build the website.

These slimebuckets never quit.