Missed warnings, conflicting messages, and broken promises — how the White House fumbled its response to the worst pandemic in a century
This story appears in the May 2020 issue of Rolling Stone, on newsstands May 5th.
Story continuesIf those projections were even in the ballpark, a crisis of unimaginable proportions was fast approaching. Dr. Eva Lee, a health care operations expert at Georgia Tech, warned that there would likely be a critical shortage of personal protective equipment for nurses and doctors. Lee wrote, “I do not know if we have enough resources to protect all front-line providers.”
There was confusion in the response from the start. In January, Trump picked HHS Secretary Alex Azar II, the former president of pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly, to lead his new Coronavirus Task Force. The problem was, there was already a senior official at HHS whose job was coordinating the federal government’s response to a nationwide pandemic, Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response Robert Kadlec.
Other federal employees involved in the response effort have had to respond to different and sometimes competing requests and directives from Pence’s task force and Kushner’s task force. “All of those roles and responsibilities should be relatively well-established,” says one public-health official who’s dealt with the White House.
Adding to the confusion, the White House has made crucial pledges and then failed to meet them. In early March, Pence vowed that more than a million tests would be ready within days. Azar followed that up by saying there would be “up to 4 million tests” available by the middle of March. Yet by March 31st, there had been just more than 1 million tests conducted.
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