Via the Columbia Journalism Review, Jon Allsop writes: The messaging mess among Trump’s top health officials. Excerpt:
Deathmilestones always feel arbitrary and inadequate; when it comes to the coronavirus pandemic, they’re also hard to measure. So it is with the latest grim statistic: the US has—or is about to, depending on your source—hit 200,000 confirmed deaths from COVID-19. Time magazine unveiled a black-bordered cover marking the 200,000 figure nearly two weeks ago; as of this morning, the Johns Hopkins dashboard, a trusted source for many news outlets, still listed 199,865 deaths; in any case, we’ve known for a while that the true, if unconfirmed, total count is likely way higher that official estimates allow. (The New York Times was confident enough to report that the 200,000 marker had been surpassed all the way back on August 12.) We clutch at numbers of apparent shared significance, but they’ve already gone by. And the deaths go on.
Amid all the tragedy is a lot of farce. That word could reasonably be applied to almost any aspect of America’s official pandemic response, but it feels especially applicable to the bungled, contradictory, often-dishonest coronavirus messaging coming out of President Trump and his allies, via the news media and the federal health bureaucracy itself.
Nearly two weeks ago, we learned, via Bob Woodward’s new book, that Trump knew the virus would be bad back in February, but downplayed it publicly anyway. Since then, a series of stories—which, individually, excited less enraged media coverage than the Woodward revelation—have shown, collectively, that duplicitous messaging remains a central problem today.
Two days after the Woodward story dropped, Politico’s Dan Diamond was first to report that Trump appointees within the Department of Health and Human Services—including Michael Caputo, a Trump campaign official turned departmental spokesperson, and Paul Alexander, an adviser to Caputo—routinely sought to meddle with weekly scientific reports that are issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and are not typically subject to political review. The meddling, Diamond wrote, had been interpreted by agency officials as an effort “to intimidate the reports’ authors and water down their communications to health professionals,” with the end goal of boosting Trump’s optimistic coronavirus narrative.
CDC officials pushed back on the interference, but “increasingly agreed to allow the political officials to review the reports and, in a few cases, compromised on the wording,” Diamond added.
Two days later, things got weird. Caputo went on his Facebook page, started live-streaming, and unleashed a barrage of unhinged claims. He accused CDC officials of “sedition” and of belonging to an anti-Trump “resistance unit” that meets at coffee shops (them again) to discuss how to undermine the president. (“To allow people to die so that you can replace the president [is a] grievous sin. And these people are all going to hell.”)
He spoke of a supposed threat from leftist “hit squads” should Trump win the election—“You understand that they’re going to have to kill me, and unfortunately, I think that’s where this is going”—and advised those watching to stock up on ammunition. He also said that he was struggling with his mental health, in part because he has been “waking up every morning and talking about dead Americans.” He insisted that he was planning to stay in his job as HHS spokesperson, but three days later, he announced that he would be taking a leave of absence, citing medical grounds and violent threats against his family. At the same time, Alexander, Caputo’s adviser, quit the department.
That was last Wednesday. The same day, Robert Redfield, the director of the CDC, testified before Congress; among other things, he said that even if a COVID vaccine were forthcoming, most Americans wouldn’t have access to it until next year, and that masks are “more guaranteed” than a vaccine to protect against the disease.
Soon after, Trump, who thinks a quick vaccine would be good for his election prospects, publicly rebuked Redfield who, Trump said, had likely misunderstood the question he was being asked. Later in the day, a spokesperson for Redfield put out a statement conceding Trump’s point and walking back Redfield’s earlier comment—but the spokesperson then tried to retract that concession. Tweets by Redfield himself sowed further confusion.
The CDC wasn’t done for the week. On Friday, the agency took two seemingly positive steps. It reversed its advice—issued last month, reportedly by political appointees rather than scientists—that people who have been in close contact with a known COVID carrier needn’t bother getting a test unless they have symptoms. And it added language to its website acknowledging that the virus can be transmitted by small airborne droplets. Outside experts praised both developments as good science—but then, yesterday, the CDC did another U-turn, deleting the new language on droplets. Observers were incredulous. (“HOLY HELL,” Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding, an epidemiologist, tweeted.) Critics of the CDC’s recent performance smelled fresh political meddling—but an agency scientist told Lena H. Sun, of the Washington Post, that on this occasion, CDC staff “shot our own foot.” A CDC spokesperson said that draft language had been posted “in error.”
Then, later yesterday, things got so weird that they made the Caputo video look routine. Lachlan Markay, of the Daily Beast, reported that William B. Crews, a communications staffer at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, also blogs for RedState—a right-wing website where, under the pen name “streiff,” he has routinely disparaged his boss, Dr. Anthony Fauci, as an “attention-grubbing and media-whoring” “mask Nazi,” and spread ludicrous misinformation about the pandemic. (“It is safe to say that the entire Wuhan virus scare was nothing more or less than a massive fraud perpetrated upon the American people by ‘experts,’” Crews/streiff wrote in June. “If there were justice, we’d send [a] few dozen of these fascists to the gallows and gibbet their tarred bodies in chains until they fall apart.”) After Markay brought streiff’s true identity to the attention of NIAID officials, Crews abruptly “retired.”
