Alex Azar’s resignation letter paints a misleading picture of Trump’s coronavirus response



Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar this week Warned President Donald Trump or the HHS under his watch. Despite the achievements, Trump’s “post-election actions and rhetoric … threaten to threaten this and other historic legacies of this administration.”

“The attacks on the Capitol were an attack on our democracy,” Azare said Letter Presented this week ahead of his departure from the government on January 20th. “I urge you to continue to condemn any form of violence … and continue to support a peaceful and orderly transition of power.”

Despite Trump’s rebuke, however, effective at noon on Uzar Day, Azar’s resignation letter is more formal than anything else. U.S. Two of Trump’s cabinet secretaries resigned in protest in early January after a deadly attack on the Capitol, but Azhar was not among them.

In December, President-elect Joe Biden appointed California Attorney General Xavier Besera as HHS secretary in the Biden administration.

Political appointees usually submit resignation letters well before the new administration takes power, but according to the New York Times, Trump was reluctant to make his request because he continued his failed attempt to continue the doomed crusade against American democracy. Office.

Last week, however, the Trump administration acknowledged the reality and requested those letters from 4,000 or so political appointees – including Azar.

In addition to using his letter as a warning to Trump – who was indicted for inciting a revolt for the second time this week – Azar also flashed a list of achievements in his nearly three-year tenure with the HHS (Azar is the second HHS secretary. Trump administration).

A diverse collection of initiatives – drug pricing, opioid crisis and rural health care inequalities, to name a few – mention it, but the Trump administration’s failed coronavirus receives top billing in the response letter.

“While we mourn every lost life,” Azar wrote of the coronavirus epidemic, which is now rampant in the U.S. More than 22,000 people have been killed in “our initial, aggressive and widespread efforts have saved the lives of hundreds of thousands or even millions of Americans.”

In fact, the Trump administration’s highly coronavirus response – from its earliest days to the present, when the country averages 231,675 cases per day – has been inflammatory and ineffective, and the U.S. vaccine rollout has changed somewhat. The number of early vaccinations was a disaster, leaving administrative targets behind and even unnecessarily dropping some doses of the vaccine.

However, in his letter, Azar praised the pace of Operation Operation – the Trump administration’s vaccine pressure – which he claims will “be achieved in nine months, which many suspect will be possible in two years or more.”

It’s not like that Absolutely False: As Vox’s Umair Irfa explained in December, Pfizer-Bioentech and Modern’s coronavirus vaccine was developed and soon developed a vaccine, in fact, it is an “unmatched scientific feat”.

But again, part of the vaccine effort meant to be carried out directly by the Trump administration – that is, the distribution of vaccines made by scientists in the private sector – is fraught with costly mistakes.

Just like this week, the U.S. As the country’s first well-known Covid-19 case approaches its one-year anniversary, there has been a flurry of speculation. Although Azar told states earlier this week that the administration would begin administering vaccine doses previously reserved for a second shot, it turned out that there was no one to release.

The Trump administration began sending those doses late last year, largely emptying the vaccine stockpile, according to the Scoop of the Washington Post on Friday.

The consequences of this misunderstanding will probably come at the state level. According to Patrick Allen, Reagan’s director of health, in a letter to Azar, the lack of additional doses “puts serious risk to plans to expand eligibility.” Those plans were made based on your reliance on your statement to ‘release the entire supply’ that you have in reserve. If this information [about the depleted vaccine reserve] To be precise, we will be able to start vaccinating our vulnerable seniors on January 23rd.

Biden has ambitious plans to fix the U.S. Covid-19 response

The incoming Biden administration, however, will not allow the U.S. Coronavirus promises to fix the response and speed up vaccination, with a target of 100 million vaccine doses given in the first 100 days in office fees.

Biden is a U.S. citizen. “This is one of the most challenging operational efforts we have made as a nation,” the vaccine effort said Thursday. “To vaccinate more people, heaven and earth will have to move, more places will have to be created for them to be vaccinated, more medical teams will have to be mobilized to get shots in people’s weapons.”

Operation Instead of inheriting the speed of the operation thread According to incoming biden press secretary Jane Sasaki, The new administration will create its own vaccination program with former Chicago health commissioner Bechara Chaukair, advancing efforts as a vaccine coordinator.

According to German Lopez of Vox, both the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the National Guard Units will play a more important role in administering the vaccine under the Biden administration, both to establish new vaccine clinics.

In addition, the Biden Plan, the most detailed version of which was released on Friday, called for an expansion of vaccines, stricter use of the Defense Production Act, more public health workers and an education campaign promoting vaccination.

The initiative is likely to be backed by a major funding stimulus: Biden announced a 9 1.9 trillion stimulus package plan this week, in which – Congress should approve it – 400 400 billion for the US coronavirus response.

As Lopez writes, this is a promising start:

Biden’s plan hits a lot of the clues I’ve heard from experts over the past few weeks as I’ve asked them what’s going wrong in America’s vaccine rollout.

First, the plan has clear goals to address what supply chain experts say, called the “Last Mile” – path vaccines take patients from storage to injection – with adequate staffing, infrastructure and plans to put shots in the arms. Second, it takes steps to ensure that supply chain problems are actively fixed, with precautionary oversight and the use of federal powers when obstacles need to be overcome. Finally, but only decisively, there is a public education campaign to ensure that Americans really want to be vaccinated when their turn comes.

However, enforcement will not be easy, and there is a need to hurry: the United States recorded more than 4,000 deaths in a single day for the first time earlier this month, with an average of 300,000 new cases being reported each day.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also warned this week that the more transmissible strain of the recently discovered Covid-19 could affect U.S. Is spreading rapidly and could lead to even more devastating cases and deaths in the near future. The best vaccination is seen as the best way to limit the risk posed by this new strain and reduce the number of new cases overall.

“We’re going to be worse than that,” CDC director Robert Redfield warned in an NPR interview Friday. “And I think if you listen to my comments in August and September, I told people that I really thought that December, January and February would be the best time ever for this country, experienced at the public health stage. See. “