From the "I Coulda Told You This" Department comes proof that Donald Trump's regime deliberately made COVID worse in the US because he didn't want to be held responsible for it. Luckily, voters did that anyway.
Trump administration officials made "deliberate efforts to undermine the nation's coronavirus response for political purposes," the House Select subcommittee on the coronavirus crisis led by Democrats said in a report released Friday.
The committee, which spent months working to interview former Trump officials, said the administration worked to undermine the public health response to the coronavirus pandemic by blocking officials from speaking publicly, watering down testing guidance and attempting to interfere with other public health guidance.
Many pieces of the report were a summation of documents and interviews they've released throughout the year, but the report also outlined new examples where health guidance was adapted despite officials' concerns about the potential harmful effects of the changes.
In one instance, Dr. Jay Butler, the deputy director for infectious diseases at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told the committee he was upset and concerned about guidance he was directed to update in May 2020 for faith communities. He said he feared that some of the altered guidance about masking and other church practices could potentially put lives at risk.
He wrote in an email about the change that he was "very troubled on this Sunday morning that there will be people who will get sick and perhaps die because of what we were forced to do."
"I was doing a lot of soul searching about whether or not I should have agreed to even make the change in the document," Butler told the committee when asked about his words. "Clearly, it was a directive, but that was a real struggle as I felt like what had been done was not good public health practice."
Butler told the committee that while he wasn't aware of any examples where the guidance had adversely impacted the health of Americans, "that concern will haunt me for some time."
The report also chronicled deep frustration from then-White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx, who at one point was so upset about a meeting that included doctors whom she called part of a "fringe group" that she told colleagues she would not attend.
"I can't be part of this with these people who believe in herd immunity," Birx wrote in an email released by the committee. That approach has been widely decried by public health experts, who note that a previous infection doesn't guarantee immunity and who say such an approach would most certainly have led to even more hospitalizations and deaths. "These are people who believe that all the curves are predetermined and mitigation is irrelevant -- they are a fringe group without grounding in epidemics, public health or on the ground common sense experience. I am happy to go out of town or whatever gives the WH cover," she wrote.
The report also laid out how one briefing so angered former President Donald Trump that CDC officials were blocked by the Trump administration for more than three months from conducting public briefings.
One official, then-CDC National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases Director Dr. Nancy Messonnier, told the committee Trump was "angered" after she gave a briefing on February 25, 2020, that warned about the danger of Covid-19. She told the select subcommittee she felt "upset" after she received calls from then-CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield and then-HHS Secretary Alex Azar about it.
CNN has reached out to Redfield and Azar for comment.
Yet another example of why Trump can never be allowed the levers of power again, but the honest truth is he'll remain a threat because he's not going to prison, and he's nt going to prison because there's a 99% chance that would start, at the very least, a series of devastating white supremacist military terrorist attacks across the country that would kill thousands, and possibly far worse.
There is good news, however. Last night the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals here in Cincy reinstated President Biden's vaccine mandates, allowing the OSHA rules to go forward. Republican attorneys general are almost certainly going to make an emergency appeal to SCOTUS in the weeks ahead.
A federal appeals court has reinstated the Biden administration’s vaccine and testing requirement for private businesses that covers about 80 million American workers.
The ruling by the 6th U.S. Court of Appeals in Cincinnati lifted a November injunction that had blocked the rule from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which applies to businesses with at least 100 workers.
In the decision Friday, the 6th Circuit noted that OSHA has historical precedent for using wide discretion to ensure worker safety and “demonstrated the pervasive danger that COVID-19 poses to workers—unvaccinated workers in particular—in their workplaces.”
The Justice Department argued last week that blocking the requirements would result in “enormous” harm to the public, as hospitals brace for an increase in Covid cases this winter and the highly mutated omicron variant takes root in more states.
“COVID-19 is spreading in workplaces, and workers are being hospitalized and dying,” the Justice Department argued in a court filing on Friday. “As COVID-19 case numbers continue to rise and a new variant has emerged, the threat to workers is ongoing and overwhelming.”
The policy required businesses with 100 or more employees to ensure their workers were fully vaccinated by Jan. 4 or submit a negative Covid test weekly to enter the workplace. Unvaccinated employees were required to start wearing masks indoors starting Dec. 5.
Republican attorneys general, private companies and industry groups such as the National Retail Federation, the American Trucking Associations, and the National Federation of Independent Business sued to have the policy overturned. They argued that the requirements are unnecessary, burden businesses with compliance costs, and exceed the authority of the federal government.
“These assertions ignore the economic analysis OSHA conducted that demonstrates the feasibility of implementing the ETS [Emergency Temporary Standard],” the 6th Circuit said Friday, labeling concerns by the petitioning groups “speculative.”
The Biden administration last month stopped implementation and enforcement of the requirements to comply with an order issued by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit in New Orleans. Judge Kurt D. Englehardt, in an opinion for a three-judge panel, said the requirements were “staggeringly overbroad” and raised “serious constitutional concerns.”
Republicans went judge-shopping and got Englehardt, a Trump-appointed goofball who raged against the mandate as unconstitutional. The Sixth Circuit not only overturned that, but found that the Biden administration absolutely proved that with hundreds of thousands of Americans dying from COVID, that there may be an actual point to using OSHA's emergency powers.
Sadly, as I've pointed out before, if the corrupt Roberts Court wants to blow a hole in federal executive agencies and cripple them for decades, this is exactly the case to use to do it.
We'll see.
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