Some things just bear repeating so they don’t slip through the cracks in such a rapidly shifting, volatile news environment. Meteor Blades included the essential facts of this particular news item in his eloquent post, here. I’m repeating it again, just so it doesn’t get lost in the maelstrom.
The following is an exchange, in its entirety, from an NPR interview of Politico reporter Dan Diamond, conducted on Thursday by Terry Gross for the program “Fresh Air.”
GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. And if you're just joining us, my guest is Dan Diamond, a reporter for Politico who investigates health care policy and politics, and he's been covering the Trump administration's response to the coronavirus.
So you've reported that Alex Azar of Health and Human Services and Seema Verma of Medicare and Medicaid both want to please President Trump. How have they gone about trying to please him during this period of the epidemic? And is that leading them to say or do things that they otherwise wouldn't do? In other words, are they doing things that shouldn't be done or needn't be done or are unnecessarily time-consuming just because they want to stay in Trump's good graces?
DIAMOND: I think they are both trying to show that they're incredibly active and aggressive in public, but some of the decisions behind the scenes haven't always reflected the best judgment of career professionals. In the case of Alex Azar, he did go to the president in January. He did push past resistance from the president's political aides to warn the president the new coronavirus could be a major problem. There were aides around Trump - Kellyanne Conway had some skepticism at times that this was something that needed to be a presidential priority.
But at the same time, Secretary Azar has not always given the president the worst-case scenario of what could happen. My understanding is he did not push to do aggressive additional testing in recent weeks, and that's partly because more testing might have led to more cases being discovered of coronavirus outbreak, and the president had made clear - the lower the numbers on coronavirus, the better for the president, the better for his potential reelection this fall.
(emphasis supplied)
From the above exchange you might get the impression that Diamond was referring to Alex Azar when he references the failure to to “push to do more aggressive additional testing in recent weeks.”
But he wasn’t talking about Azar. After the interview had aired, Diamond himself clarified that it was Trump, not Azar, who “did not push to do aggressive additional testing,” in part because such testing might have led to additional cases being discovered, which would hurt Trump’s re-election prospects.
Below is the Tweet where Fresh Air clarified exactly what Diamond meant.
As the numbers of those infected catapult into the thousands, multiplying exponentially on a weekly basis, Americans should remember that this president deliberately stalled the testing process at the outset, because he was more concerned about what higher numbers would do to his election chances.
It’s not clear how many more people will get sick or die because of Trump’s deliberate inaction, but it is going to be a substantial number. Had Trump pushed for more aggressive testing, using all the powers available to him as president, the trajectory of this pandemic could and probably would have been altered—to what extent, no one knows. But saving American lives should have been the only priority of this administration. Trump’s own perception of his re-election prospects should never have factored in to that equation.
As the country rapidly goes to ground, and our hospitals begin to fill up with the sick, that may at least give Americans something to occupy their thoughts.