As the COVID-19 death toll in the U.S. climbs toward 100,000, Donald Trump and team have decided that attacking the Centers for Disease Control is a more productive use of their time than finally trying to come up with a coherent strategy to stem the coronavirus epidemic. On Sunday's Meet the Press, White House trade adviser Peter Navarro trashed the CDC—again. "Early on in this crisis, the CDC—which really had the most trusted brand around the world in this space—really let the country down with the testing," Navarro said. "Because not only did they keep the testing within the bureaucracy, they had a bad test. And that did set us back."
Here we go again. Trump's team has been throwing the CDC under the bus for a solid two months now. That’s two months during which he didn't do a goddamned thing about ramping up testing, or production of PPE and critical medical equipment and supplies. If there's a failure at the CDC, it's thanks to Trump's having disbanded critical pandemic response units in the CDC and the National Security Council.
It wasn't just the CDC Navarro attacked. He pulled the old "China did it" trick out of his hat, with another dig at the WHO. "The virus was spawned in Wuhan province," Navarro said. "Patient zero was in November. The Chinese, behind the shield of the World Health Organization, for two months hid the virus from the world, and then sent hundreds of thousands of Chinese on aircraft to Milan, New York and around the world to seed that. They could have kept it in Wuhan. Instead, it became a pandemic." Then Navarro turned his sights on the entirety of the medical community for speaking out against the premature reopening of the economy Trump has decided on, saying "some of the people in the medical community want to just run and hide until the virus is extinguished." Which a.) is how an extremely infectious disease is prevented and b.) news to the entire medical community which has put its collective life on the line to try to save people.
Navarro wasn't done attacking both China and the medical community, though. "What President Trump realized early on is that, if you lock people down, you may save lives directly from the China virus, but you indirectly are going to kill a lot more people" through suicide or substance abuse, Navarro alleged. By the way, China has had fewer than 4,700 deaths and just seven new cases reported
Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar had a hard time toeing the Trump line and defending the CDC, which his department oversees. He was pressed to respond to Navarro on Face the Nation, inadvertently putting the onus on another agency he oversees. "I don't believe the CDC let this country down," Azar said. "I believe the CDC serves an important public health role. And what was always critical was to get the private sector to the table [on testing]." The private sector tried its damnedest to get on board with testing but the Food and Drug Administration refused to relax its restrictions on testing development by outside labs until the middle of March, and then created a run on the necessary supplies the CDC-developed test requires.
But it comes back to the CDC and Azar, who Trump has been dangling on a string for months because of course Azar is to blame for Trump's bad polling when it comes to health care. It didn't help that the CDC's director, Robert Redfield, talked about the fact that the nation's public health infrastructure has been weakened in a congressional hearing last week. "We need to rebuild our nation's public health infrastructure," he told the committee, including "data and data analytics, public health laboratory resilience and our nation's public health workforce." The admission that something is broken was enough to unleash the attack dogs. In this case, the dog was the totally-not-a-public-health-expert Navarro.