By the beginning of May, word leaked that the daily meetings of the task force itself would be ended, though Mr. Trump, who had not been told, backpedaled after the story caused an uproar.
On testing, Mr. Trump shifted from stressing that the nation was already doing more than any other country to deriding its importance. By June the president was regularly making nonsensical statements like, “If we stop testing right now, we’d have very few cases, if any.”
But during the middle weeks of April the president’s decision to largely walk away from an active leadership role — and give many states permission to believe the worst of the crisis was behind them — came abruptly into public view.
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. “I would say without question it’s the biggest decision I’ve ever had to make.”
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.Sign up to receive an email when we publish a new story about the 2020 election.Sign Up
The following 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.
In political terms, the document’s message was that responsibility for dealing with the pandemic was shifting from Mr. Trump to the states.
Everything was about dealing with Trump’s insanity, trying to appease him, trying to steer him away from catastrophe because he is so fucked up.
And Birx has her own agenda:
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 story, dialed local health officials in New Orleans, New York and Chicago, where he heard desperation unrecognizable in the more sanguine White House meetings.
Dr. Fauci had his own critics, who said he relied on anecdotes and experience rather than data, and who felt he was not sufficiently attuned to the devastating economic and social consequences of a national lockdown.
As the pandemic worsened, Dr. Fauci’s darker view of the circumstances was countered by the reassurances ostensibly offered by Dr. Birx’s data.
A renowned AIDS researcher who holds the title of “ambassador” as the State Department’s special representative for global health diplomacy, she had assembled a team of analysts who worked late nights in the White House complex, feeding her a constant stream of updated data, packaged in PowerPoint slides emailed to senior officials each day.
There were warnings that the models she 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.
“We made clear that to get the epidemic under control and bring it down to effectively zero transmission required the social distancing mandates to be in place,” said Christopher J. L. Murray, the director of the modeling program. “April 22 — somewhere around that period. That’s when the tone shifted. They started to ask questions about what will be the trajectory and where with the lifting of mandates?”
Some state officials were also alarmed by the administration’s use of the University of Washington model.
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.)
Dr. Birx declined to be interviewed. A task force official said she had only used the University of Washington model in a limited way and that the White House used “real data, not modeled data, to understand the pandemic in the United States.”
The official said the White House “immediately reacted to the early signs of community spread” by working with governors in the affected states.
But despite 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.
Birx is part of the evangelical Christian Public Health sub-culture that surrounds Mike Pence. She was always someone I suspected would put Trump’s political needs ahead of the science. She may have even believed that the virus was contained. Trumpers believe a lot of things.
Anyway, this is a devastating critique of the administration’s response, which we all watched in real time.
There’s more of this big story and it’s worth reading it all if you can. It is a recitation of failure on an unprecedented level. And we’re all paying the price for it today.