It’s over. At least as far as Trump’s concerned:
At the height of the coronavirus pandemic, the White House task force that President Donald Trump assembled to manage the health crisis met every day. But in recent weeks, as the virus continues to spread and health experts warn of a potential surge in cases across the country this summer, the group has met formally just three times.
And in a new sign that the task force’s work may be nearing an end, its members have begun drafting a final after-action report highlighting the president’s response that’s expected to be completed in the coming weeks, according to two senior administration officials.
At the same time, the White House’s effort to reshape the task force to more closely align with Trump’s optimism about possible vaccines and treatments for the virus has been rocky. Just days after the White House announced Dr. Peter Marks as a new member the task force, Marks quietly left because of concerns that his participation could present a conflict of interest with his current job at the Food and Drug Administration, according to a person familiar with the move.
Marks, whom Trump has described as “highly accomplished,” left the group three weeks ago, but remains in the administration as director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research. Marks also distanced himself as a member of Trump’s “dream team” working on his administration’s fast-track vaccine, called Operation Warp Speed, because of his concerns it might conflict with his role in vaccine oversight at FDA.
“Operation Warp Speed is a critical endeavor that I have been grateful to help stand up over the past few months, and there is now an exceptional team of vaccine development, manufacturing, and clinical trial experts in place advancing the program,” Dr. Marks said in a statement.
“With knowledge that some of our population is skeptical of vaccine development efforts, I believe that the American public is best served by my return full time to the FDA,” he continued. “In my role as a regulator there, I will continue to work advancing the development and availability of vaccines against COVID-19 that people can trust as being safe and effective.”
The task force report being drafted is expected to be far more of a highlights reel from the perspective of the president, who has chafed at criticism of his handling of the pandemic, officials said. It is unlikely to be a critical retrospective of what may have gone wrong and lessons learned that could be applied in a future pandemic, they said.
The dubious standing of the White House’s coronavirus task force comes as some health officials have watched with alarm as thousands of people crowd into streets and public spaces to protest the death of George Floyd, a black man from Minneapolis who died at the hands of a white police officer just over a week ago.
Over the past week, even as American deaths exceeded 100,000 from the respiratory illness, no health experts have appeared from the White House to offer advice or guidance on what these large protests may mean for health risks.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said it was “monitoring closely” the huge gatherings that for the last three months were explicitly prevented by its own guidance, acknowledging that the “risk” of the coronavirus remains serious.
I remain hopeful that the mask wearing and outdoor gatherings of these mass protests will not result in s spike in cases and spread to vulnerable populations. But it’s so risky.
The malaria drug hydroxychloroquine did not prevent Covid-19 in a rigorous study of 821 people who had been exposed to patients infected with the virus, researchers from the University of Minnesota and Canada are reporting on Wednesday.
The study was the first large controlled clinical trial of hydroxychloroquine, a drug that President Trump has repeatedly promoted and recently taken himself. Conducted in the United States and Canada, this trial was also the first to test whether the drug could prevent illness in people who have been exposed to the coronavirus.
This type of study, in which patients are picked at random to receive either an experimental treatment or a placebo, is considered the most reliable way to measure the safety and effectiveness of a drug. The participants were health care workers and people who had been exposed at home to ill spouses, partners or parents.
“The take-home message for the general public is that if you’re exposed to someone with Covid-19, hydroxychloroquine is not an effective post-exposure preventive therapy,” the lead author of the study, Dr. David R. Boulware, from the University of Minnesota, said in an interview.
But hey, this is all so last month isn’t it?