The GOP COVID-19 subcommittee appears to have followed a script from the Heritage Foundation that’s behind Project 2025.
|
Listen To This Story
 |
To hear Donald Trump tell it, recalling the early days of the pandemic on this year’s campaign trail, he was the hero who did an outstanding job of leading the nation through the chaos and does not get sufficient credit for his stellar performance.
As with nearly all things Trump, the reality is wildly different from, if not outright opposite to, his claim. Just ask some of the many public health and government officials who got a close-up view of his actual performance in the time of crisis and have spoken out against the former president.
Trump’s gross mishandling of the COVID-19 outbreak — along with his plan to further gut a national pandemic preparedness capability, which he had already crippled when he disbanded the National Security Council’s global health security directorate in 2018 — is one of many dark clouds that are, or should be, hanging over his bid to return to power.
Republicans have relentlessly promoted the idea that we are, as one observer put it, “worse off today than we were four years ago, while skipping over the year 2020 like it’s the 13th floor in a building.”
Naturally, the GOP is doing everything it can to keep the American public from finding out what really happened, which is why it is crucial before heading into the upcoming election that we review the harrowing days of 2020.
The timing of the COVID-19 outbreak is a key piece of America’s pandemic story: It happened as Trump was gearing up to hit the rally circuit for his 2020 reelection campaign. Focused entirely on protecting “his” economy (and political prospects), and downplaying the threat of the virus, Trump and his team embraced quick fixes not supported by science, and kicked off a senseless war with a scientific community striving to find genuine solutions and share knowledge — all the while being sabotaged by the Trump team’s messaging that flew dangerously in the face of reality.
The collision of purposes and agendas started early, before most Americans had even an inkling of the approaching crisis. Trump was reportedly furious in late February 2020 when Dr. Nancy Messonnier, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), announced publicly that the COVID-19 global health emergency was heading for pandemic status and could upend life.
Just before, Trump had cheerfully tweeted:
The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA. We are in contact with everyone and all relevant countries. CDC & World Health have been working hard and very smart. Stock Market starting to look very good to me!” (Feb 24, 2020)
Trump was obsessed with optics. In one infamous example, he suggested blocking a cruise ship with COVID-infected passengers from docking in San Francisco because — as he said during a March 6 visit to the CDC, when there had been 240 confirmed cases and 11 deaths in the US — “I like the numbers where they are” and “I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn’t our fault.”
Messonnier’s sobering announcement struck Trump not as a necessary step in informing and preparing the public but as terrible optics. Soon after, he began to refer to COVID-19 as the Democrats’ “new hoax.” But he knew all along how dangerous the virus was. Earlier that month, he told journalist Bob Woodward -– privately — that the virus was “deadly stuff.”
In the days following Messonnier’s announcement, the stock market went into free fall. Trump’s response was not to inquire on how we might avoid the coming catastrophe. No, it was, allegedly, to inquire about firing Messonnier — for accurately warning the public that the world had entered a deadly pandemic. She was removed from public briefings for the remainder of 2020, and left the CDC the following year. She was the first scientist — but certainly not the last — to become an enemy of Trump during the pandemic.
Emboldened by big money interests, Trump’s pattern of undermining the scientific community for his own perceived political benefit would play out many times over, with disastrous effects on public health.
What a Difference a Single Letter Makes
In 2022, there was a congressional effort to investigate Trump’s egregious failures during the first year of the pandemic. The Democrat-led House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis (HSSCC) produced three key reports on the Trump administration’s interference with the federal COVID-19 response.
The first report from the HSSCC was on herd immunity.
The second concerned the promotion of hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) as cure for COVID-19.
The third revealed the control over CDC messaging exerted by the Trump administration.
Unfortunately, after Republicans took over the House in the 2022 midterm elections, the HSSCC was replaced by the GOP-led House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic (HSSCP).This second subcommittee has been writing over the work of the first and distracting from the disturbing reality of Trump’s failures in 2020 to aid his 2024 campaign.
Of great concern, the HSSCP appears to be following a playbook from the right-wing power player Heritage Foundation’s “Road Map for COVID-19 Congressional Oversight,” published in January 2023 — one month before the opening hearing.
The Heritage Foundation is, of course, also behind the extreme Project 2025 plan to fundamentally reshape the US government under a second Trump presidency.
Herd Immunity: ‘Dangerous and Discredited’ Strategy
The first key HSSCC report, The “Atlas Dogma”: The Trump Administration’s Embrace of a Dangerous and Discredited Herd Immunity via Mass Infection Strategy, is named after Dr. Scott Atlas, one of the right-wing doctors who, along with Trump and his son-in-law/adviser Jared Kushner, worked behind the back of White House coronavirus response coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx.
Atlas — a senior fellow at the conservative, Koch-tied Hoover Institution on Stanford University’s campus, from whom the school formally distanced itself over his COVID-19 views — discussed this secretive work in his book A Plague Upon Our House: My Fight at the Trump White House to Stop COVID from Destroying America.
Working alongside Atlas were:
- Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a health economist from Stanford also affiliated with the Hoover Institute and a college friend of MAGA mega-donor Peter Thiel;
- Dr. Martin Kulldorff, a former Harvard University biostatistician who was an adviser to a global anti-lockdown umbrella group alongside the former lead psychologist for Cambridge Analytica;
- Dr. Joseph Ladapo, who would go on to serve as Gov. Ron DeSantis’s (R-FL) deeply controversial anti-vax surgeon general.
Kushner, who was placed in charge of dealing with the personal protective equipment shortage the US had going into the pandemic, had a particularly callous and cynical rationale for promoting a let-it-rip pandemic strategy. Realizing COVID-19 would hit urban centers — home to a higher density of minorities and left-leaning voters — hardest, Kushner saw letting the virus disproportionately impact these communities, and then blaming blue-state governors for the damage, as “an effective political strategy” going into the 2020 election.
The deadly herd-immunity strategy embraced by the Trump White House was formalized in the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD) — an open letter drafted in Great Barrington, MA, that recommended rejecting broad-based public health measures like shutdowns and instead focusing on limited protections of the most vulnerable, while allowing the rest of the population to attain herd immunity through widespread infection with the novel virus.
The letter was published in October 2020, a month ahead of the presidential election, in an apparent effort to legitimize the Trump administration’s pandemic policy — or lack thereof — over the preceding months.
The GBD was put together by the Koch network-tied think tank, American Institute for Economic Research, and authored by Bhattacharya, Kulldorff, and Oxford University epidemiologist Dr. Sunetra Gupta. This event was overseen by far-right economist Jeffrey Tucker, who now runs the anti-science Brownstone Institute.
Also present was David Zweig, who was later one of Elon Musk’s hand-picked journalists to cover the “Twitter Files” effort claiming right-wing views on the pandemic were being censored online. Bhattacharya would take part in the Twitter Files debacle as well as a failed legal effort to stop the Biden administration from communicating with social media sites over misinformation. Zweig would appear as an HSSCP expert witness called by the GOP majority in 2023 shortly after Bhattacharya.
The GBD’s herd immunity strategy already had months to show it did not work — especially in minority communities — by the time it was published and called “unethical” by the director-general of the World Health Organization, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. Dr. Anthony Fauci — then-director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and chief medical adviser to Trump — said it was “total nonsense” that would “lead to hospitalizations and deaths.”
The efforts of Fauci and the then-director of the National Institutes for Health (NIH), Dr. Francis Collins, to stop the spread of the GBD’s dangerous, anti-scientific ideas led to cries of partisan censorship from Bhattacharya et al. In reality, the GBD’s attack on public health was itself partisan and egregious in its omissions of contrary evidence. And, a 2022 paper modeling the GBD’s proposed policies showed why this was never a viable strategy.
In June 2022, Birx testified to the HSSCC about the undermining of science that occurred in the Trump White House. She said “the White House was distracted about its reelection” during the summer and fall of 2020 and that Atlas’s presence “destroyed any cohesion in the response in the White House itself.”
Birx further claimed Trump’s early embrace of anti-scientific ideas cost roughly 130,000 American lives before a vaccine was available.
The work of Trump’s contrarian doctors was recorded in painstaking detail in the 2023 book We Want Them Infected by neurologist and Science-Based Medicine writer Dr. Jonathan Howard, who experienced the horrific first wave of COVID-19 in the New York City hospitals.
Despite the devastation of their policies, the doctors and scientists who pushed the herd immunity strategy in the Trump White House have met with few consequences. Indeed, Bhattacharya and Atlas continue to be hosted for talks about pandemic policy at Stanford and other prestigious universities.
It is worth highlighting that the GBD was a cross-Atlantic partnership thanks to Gupta, and the herd immunity strategy was also embraced by former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Unlike the US, however, the UK has openly addressed such pandemic leadership failures in its Covid Inquiry last year, placing blame for avoidable deaths on Johnson’s administration.
Following their work in the Trump White House, Bhattacharya and Kulldorff have served on DeSantis’s Public Health Integrity Committee, which has failed to call out Ladapo’s integrity issues or investigate the “health freedom” state’s excess COVID-19 deaths.
Additionally, they are members of the Norfolk Group, created with the aid of the Brownstone Institute to send GOP-friendly experts to the HSSCP. Bhattacharya and Kulldorff testified at the first HSSCP hearing in February 2023 focused on “examining COVID policy decisions.” Both were highlighted in the Heritage “Road Map,” which bears a striking resemblance to the blueprint put forth by the Norfolk Group.
‘A Knife-Fight With the FDA’
The second key HSSCC report, A ‘Knife-Fight’ With the FDA: The Trump White House’s Relentless Attacks on FDA’s Coronavirus Response, discusses a behind-the-scenes effort throughout 2020 by the Trump administration to push the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), which the president had been promoting as a COVID-19 cure since March of that year.
WhoWhatWhy reporting from earlier this year laid out how Trump and right-wing media came to embrace HCQ based on a Musk-promoted Google Doc “white paper” citing the now disgraced French scientist Dr. Didier Raoult’s debunked work. While Trump recklessly told the American public that HCQ was a “game changer” in mid-March 2020, Fauci — who would become MAGA Enemy #1 — cautioned that the early promise of the drug was based solely on “anecdotal evidence” and that it had not been proven effective against COVID-19.
Nevertheless, Trump’s endorsement of HCQ — which received a controversial emergency use authorization for COVID-19 clinical trials — caused a run on the drug and a dangerous shortage for those who require it daily for its other uses, such as for lupus.
By early June 2020, a major randomized control trial out of the University of Minnesota published results showing HCQ had no efficacy against COVID-19. Unfortunately, this would not be the end of Right’s embrace of the drug that had received Trump’s gold seal of approval.
HYDROXYCHLOROQUINE & AZITHROMYCIN, taken together, have a real chance to be one of the biggest game changers in the history of medicine. The FDA has moved mountains – Thank You! Hopefully they will BOTH (H works better with A, International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents)…..
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 21, 2020
….be put in use IMMEDIATELY. PEOPLE ARE DYING, MOVE FAST, and GOD BLESS EVERYONE! @US_FDA @SteveFDA @CDCgov @DHSgov
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 21, 2020
The Knife-Fight report details how Trump insiders like Peter Navarro, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), and Steve Bannon worked with a few HCQ-promoting physicians to keep pushing the pharma “cure” and to pressure the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to reauthorize HCQ’s COVID-19 emergency use authorization. (The EUA was appropriately not reauthorized.)
While this group plotted behind the scenes, a different group of Trump-aligned doctors was brought together in a coordinated effort from the Council for National Policy to publicly prop up Trump’s pandemic policies and false promises.
In late July 2020, weeks after the Minnesota trial’s results were posted, America’s Frontline Doctors (AFLDS), featuring Ladapo and led by future insurrectionist Dr. Simone Gold, held a press conference on the steps of the Supreme Court promoting HCQ and decrying lockdowns and mitigation efforts such as masks and distancing. This stunt would go viral before being removed from social media platforms for violating misinformation policies — leading to accusations of censorship from Gold and her new ally, the notorious anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
The HSSCC made some effort to investigate AFLDS and their allies but, likely owing to the vast amount of territory it was tasked with covering, appears to have lacked follow-through in this particular area.
In October 2021, the Democrat-led subcommittee sent letters to AFLDS and SpeakWithAnMD.com, a platform AFLDS used to prescribe “early treatment.” In January 2022, the HSSCC sent another letter to SpeakWithAnMD.com demanding it “stop withholding documents on the monetization of coronavirus misinformation.” Reporting from Time last year revealed that an online pharmacy used by AFLDS had grossed millions.
The HSSCC also sent a letter to Navarro in December 2021 demanding compliance with their subpoena. Navarro, who is involved with Project 2025, recently finished serving a prison sentence for defying a subpoena from the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol. Bannon reported to prison for the same conviction this summer.
Regrettably, the primetime hearings from the January 6th committee during the summer of 2022 eclipsed the work of the HSSCC. Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) served on both committees and there was a missed opportunity for cross-committee communication regarding the many ties between Trump’s attacks on democracy and on public health in his desperate attempt to stay in office in 2020.
It is worth noting that the full version of the Mother Jones Bannon leaks, a portion of which was played during one of the J6 hearings, reveal ousting Fauci to have been part of the plan on Insurrection Day.
Now we have the GOP-led HSSCP going beyond merely refusing to continue investigating the pushing of false COVID-19 cures — which would go on to include ivermectin by late 2020 thanks to Johnson, as detailed in previous WhoWhatWhy reporting.
At an HSSCP hearing in March, Dr. David Gortler — a pharmacist, Heritage Foundation senior research fellow, and 2023 Brownstone Institute fellow — stated that “the countries, physicians, & pharmacists who prescribed ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine” were right to do so. This is despite multiple large, high quality studies showing the inefficacy of HCQ and ivermectin against COVID-19 and a current HCQ wrongful death lawsuit against AFLDS.
“To the countries, physicians, & pharmacists who prescribed ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine, I would like to tell you right now, you were right.”
Dr. Gortler obliterated the “science” Americans were expected to believe about COVID treatments and the COVID vaccine in Congress… pic.twitter.com/UJInVqdSdb
— Heritage Foundation (@Heritage) March 21, 2024
As Gortler recognized, the US was not the only country whose politicians pushed these failed early treatment drugs for COVID-19. In 2021, the Brazilian senate concluded that the country’s former president, Jair Bolsonaro, should be “charged with nine offenses, including crimes against humanity and charlatanism, for promoting false treatments such as hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin” and there was “outrage” in 2022 when a politically-aligned prosecutor shelved these charges.
As the Knife-Fight report discusses, Navarro’s office was put in touch with a Bolsonaro-aligned virologist in Brazil — thanks to a connection from a former co-host of Bannon’s War Room podcast — to find a “good HCQ paper.” There was some terribly unethical COVID-19 early treatment research carried out in Brazil under Bolsonaro on elderly and indigenous groups.
Vaccines, even ones that have barely been tested, are apparently fine and dandy when they can help get you reelected, but the same vaccines, even after they have been far more thoroughly tested, are deadly, even some sort of deep-state plot, when opposing them and fear-mongering about them plays to your base and benefits you politically. Such, in a nutshell, are the situational ethics of Donald Trump and his MAGA movement.
While AFLDS and the Republican Party — thanks in no small part to its embrace of Kennedy — would make anti-vaxxism a central piece of its party platform, it is worth noting that the Knife-Fight report concludes with discussion of how Trump tried to exert pressure on the FDA to get the COVID-19 vaccines out before Election Day in 2020. At the time, the trials on the vaccines were held up by the 60-day monitoring period for adverse events — extremely rare occurrences that the anti-vax Right has now politicized.
Just to be clear, the point here is that vaccines, even ones that have barely been tested, are apparently fine and dandy when they can help get you reelected, but the same vaccines, even after they have been far more thoroughly tested, are deadly, even some sort of deep-state plot, when opposing them and fear-mongering about them plays to your base and benefits you politically. Such, in a nutshell, are the situational ethics of Donald Trump and his MAGA movement.
That movement’s steady spread of vaccine misinformation following Trump’s departure from the White House contributed to an estimated 232,000 preventable unvaccinated deaths during the delta and initial omicron waves. Given what is known about Kushner’s political pandemic ploy, it is worth questioning whether the spread of anti-vax misinformation from the Right was done with intent to undermine the administration of Trump’s successor, whose pandemic-fighting strategy was urging vaccination, or just to create chaos for nation-destabilizing chaos’s sake.
Whatever the case, their war on vaccines ended up hurting more of their own voter base, with higher COVID-19 death rates in Trump-voting counties and red states in 2021 and 2022.
Compromising Communication of Health Information
The final key HSSCC report, “It Was Compromised”: The Trump Administration’s Unprecedented Campaign to Control CDC and Politicize Public Health During the Coronavirus Crisis, got more major media coverage than the previous output from the subcommittee. MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow hosted HSSCC chairman Rep. James Clyburn (D-SC) when the report was published in October 2022.
As Maddow covered, the CDC was forced to run all messaging through a Trump campaign aide, who did not have any scientific experience or relevant qualifications, before it could reach the public. This included the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports (MMWR), never previously reviewed by politicians and serving as the CDC’s gold standard messaging.
In one particularly glaring instance of political intrusion into public health communication, Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, left the deputy director of the CDC feeling “very shaken” after a phone call over an MMWR he felt made Trump look bad. Meadows is now a senior partner at the Conservative Partner Institute, which is advising Project 2025.
The HSSCC report states that Trump officials made attempts to “influence the process, manipulate the content, or block the dissemination of at least 19 different CDC scientific reports that they deemed to be politically harmful to President Trump.” Some of these Trump-aligned officials were employees of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), pitting scientific institutions against one another as the nation suffered.
One Trump-appointed HHS adviser, Dr. Paul Alexander, sent an email on July 4, 2020, to HHS senior officials pushing for young people to get infected with a virus with unknown long-term complications — “we want them infected” — to achieve herd immunity. He further urged a need “to stop Fauci from talking.”
This hijacking of the CDC by the Trump HHS makes recent commentary from Roger Severino — vice president of domestic policy at Heritage Foundation, author of Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership chapter on the HHS, and former director of the HHS Office for Civil Rights under Trump — that “CDC’s credibility has been so damaged because it bungled the Covid response” ring hollow. The CDC did indeed make major errors, but criticism from Fauci and others who have not tethered themselves to a political agenda carries far more weight here.
In May 2020, Dr. Rick Bright, who formerly led HHS’s Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, filed a federal whistleblower complaint against the HHS following his ouster after he pushed back on Trump’s embrace of HCQ. While Bright settled with the HHS the following year, his complaint and testimony before Congress alerted the public about the severity of the leadership problem with Trump and his enablers.
It unfortunately did not stop MAGA’s anti-science machine from chugging right along into the 2020 election and beyond — and now into another presidential election year.
Physicians and scientists who have tried to combat widespread misinformation regarding COVID-19, its treatments, and the vaccines — and endeavored to put out high quality, science-supported information — have done so against a wall of hate and at personal sacrifice. Unfortunately, they have carried the ball largely without the support of scientific and academic institutions that avoid engaging more than superficially in political matters.
Dr. Peter Hotez — a physician, vaccine scientist, and author of The Deadly Rise of Anti-Science — has been at the forefront of this fight for scientific integrity in the public discourse around COVID-19. As thanks for his efforts, he’s received targeted harassment from high-power disinformation sources like Bannon and Kennedy and, more recently, from the GOP’s HSSCP.
The HSSCP is doing nothing to stop the poisoning of the information space that leads to this sort of hostility towards scientists. In fact, subcommittee member and MAGA loyalist Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) has been fanning the flames of conspiratorial hate online, at rallies, and on Capitol Hill. During Fauci’s appearance before the HSSCP, the conspiracy-peddling Greene recklessly accused him of “crimes against humanity” and told him he belonged in prison.
While actively serving on the subcommittee, Greene has hosted anti-vaccine events separate from the HSSCP, which have featured some of the same debunked “experts” as Johnson’s previous panels. In reality, the COVID-19 shots have prevented an estimated 18.5 million hospitalizations and 3.2 million deaths in the US. Dr. Paul Offit — a pediatrician focused on infectious diseases and vaccines, and author of Tell Me When It’s Over — has pushed back on the misinformation spread at Greene’s events in his substack newsletter.
But passionate individual scientists placing themselves in the eye of the misinformation maelstrom — without sufficient support from the rest of the scientific community, or from Democrats in office who seem to have treated COVID-19 as a politically toxic topic to be avoided — is not a sustainable mode for serving public health.
Furthermore, debunking the mis- and dis-info and putting out high quality information are not sufficient — especially with online platforms prioritizing misinformation for engagement and/or to suit the ideology of owners like Musk — to tackle what is a deeply political problem.
We have needed leaders in science, politics, and the media to engage fully with this issue in order to get to its root. That starts by addressing how deep the root goes, and whom it connects. Following the political power and money is a good strategy here. There will, naturally, be resistance to this — but that is not reason to shy away from taking this network on.
The eroded faith in our nation’s scientific institutions like the CDC will take years to restore — if they are even allowed to continue functioning at any appreciable level under the Project 2025 plan. Meanwhile, there will continue to be health concerns for which the American people need to be able to get quality information.
This war waged on scientific institutions during the pandemic must be understood as part of a larger anti-government attack on American institutions from the far-Right, which predates the pandemic. It is a long-term issue and far more important than any one president or election for which strategy — and science itself — has been altered.
This brand of extremist politics is how the US — a world leader in science — failed so gravely to respond to the pandemic, resulting in an unfathomably high avoidable death toll. We can’t simply look away from this tragedy; we must give it the post-mortem analysis it deserves, no matter how uncomfortable.
Unfortunately, that is not the apparent mission of the HSSCP.
The Lab Leak Theory Returns
So what exactly is the GOP-led HSSCP using taxpayer dollars to do then? To put it simply, pointing a finger at anyone but Trump. This has played out in a focus on the COVID-19 lab leak origin theory and congressional targeting of individual scientists.
The lab leak theory is emphasized in the Heritage Foundation’s “Road Map” for the HSSCP. It is also central to the recently released report from Heritage’s own “Non-Partisan Commission on China and COVID-19,” which aims to blame American pandemic damage on China. The Heritage “Road Map” names as “key weaknesses” in the federal COVID-19 response the “suppressing of scientific dissent” from the GBD crowd alongside “veiling the origins of COVID-19.”
Trump, who engaged in racist rhetoric regarding China during the outbreak, was quick to blame the pandemic on a lab leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). This appears to have been following the “Corona Big Book” of GOP talking points published in April 2020 by strategic communications firm O’Donnell & Associates on how to frame the pandemic against Chinese adversaries.
All over the World the CoronaVirus, a very bad “gift” from China, marches on. Not good!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 28, 2020
NIH funding was initially and controversially yanked from WIV and EcoHealth Alliance, an organization that conducts federally-funded global research into viruses, under Trump — despite lack of evidence it was responsible for the COVID-19 outbreak. Meanwhile, Bannon made a right-wing media star out of rogue Chinese virologist Li-Meng Yan, who wildly claimed the virus was a bio-weapon intentionally released by the Chinese Communist Party.
Today, while the specific mechanism of the COVID-19 outbreak is not known, most virologists hold that a natural spillover from wildlife, as has been seen in previous pandemics, is most likely. There is no evidence to show that US-funded research in Wuhan gave rise to COVID-19. But MAGA, true to form, has clearly shown its willingness to take off with a politically useful strategy without sufficient evidence during this pandemic.
The HSSCP has not only pushed the lab leak theory, but has tried to pin the pandemic on scientists like Fauci via discussion surrounding NIH funding of WIV research. After putting Fauci through 14 hours of behind-closed-doors grilling in February and sitting on that testimony for months, the HSSCP released the transcript and subpoenaed emails ahead of his June hearing before the subcommittee.
During the hearing, Democratic members of the HSSCP admitted the material the subcommittee had collected failed to find proof of wrongdoing and apologized to the now-retired doctor for their colleagues’ relentless targeting of him.
A month prior to Fauci’s appearance, the HSSCP held a hearing with EcoHealth Alliance president Dr. Peter Daszak. It became clear the goal of the Republicans was to sacrifice Daszak in order to push their lab leak narrative, and, unfortunately, subcommittee Democrats failed to come to his support as needed.
Important article on yesterday’s disgusting Stalinist show trial in the House of Representatives: The politicization of the pandemic continues – great writing as always from @hiltzikm @latimes https://t.co/Ptg2EgT4QI
— Prof Peter Hotez MD PhD (@PeterHotez) May 2, 2024
This came after Daszak’s opening statement wherein he discussed the harrowing abuse he had already received during the pandemic — “Our organization, staff, and even my own family were often targeted with false allegations, death threats, break-ins, media harassment, and other damaging acts” — echoing the well-known abuse of Fauci.
The biggest issue actually found with EcoHealth Alliance was a progress report filed late apparently due to an issue with the NIH’s website. In normal circumstances, this would obviously not be cause for a grilling from Congress.
Following the hearing, the HHS (the NIH’s parent organization) released a letter announcing movement to debar EcoHealth from future NIH funding, citing the work of the HSSCP. The subcommittee submitted a ready made debarment referral to the HHS the same day as Daszak’s hearing, further strengthening assessments that these hearings are all for show.
Following HSSCP Chairman Rep. Brad Wenstrup’s (R-OH) public comments about debarring Daszak personally, the HHS obliged and filed a personal suspension and proposed debarment notice to Daszak, making clear the level of scapegoating to which the subcommittee has stooped.
Regardless of what happened in China in late 2019, we would have been better off today had Trump not been in the Oval Office when the pandemic hit American soil.
On September 24, EcoHealth published a 146-page rebuttal to the claims made against it by the HSSCP, a likely costly undertaking to defend itself.
Sacrificing Daszak and EcoHealth Alliance to an unfounded accusation over COVID-19 origins risks sacrificing preparedness for future pandemics. Following the debarment announcement, Hotez — whose next book, Science Under Siege, is due for publication next year — remarked that, “EcoHealth Alliance is one of the few organizations we have to track the emergence of new and dangerous virus pathogens. If they disappear, our national security suffers.”
The reality is that even if COVID-19 did emerge from a lab leak scenario — which is, again, not what the science points to — it would of course not absolve Trump et al. of their colossal pandemic failures. Regardless of what happened in China in late 2019, we would have been better off today had Trump not been in the Oval Office when the pandemic hit American soil.
Unwilling to be a true leader in a time of crisis, unwilling to place the public welfare before his own, he attempted to blame his predecessor, Barack Obama, for not leaving the Trump administration with a pandemic playbook. This was, of course, false. Indeed, as previously mentioned, Trump disbanded the National Security Council’s Global Health Security and Biodefense unit in 2018.
Sadly, the nation had the tools to handle this crisis but leadership — or rather a lack thereof — was the limiting factor.
Heading Into Election 2024
Just as they were back in 2020, MAGA is prioritizing short-term politics over what is best for the country Trump wants to lead once again. Another Trump presidency would witness a worsening of the assault on science seen throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.
In a recent Time interview, Trump vowed to gut the Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy. He’s also dangled the idea of cutting federal funding to schools that mandate vaccination while on the campaign trail — just as there has been a rise in preventable pediatric disease thanks to a scare campaign-driven decrease in routine childhood vaccination rates.
In most U.S. K-12 public schools, the vaccine requirements are set by state legislatures. This practice has kept down dangerous childhood illnesses such as measles, pertussis, polio. Mr. Trump & RFK’s dangerous antivaccine rhetoric could prompt some states to remove requirements https://t.co/mQjMHRwWhO
— Prof Peter Hotez MD PhD (@PeterHotez) May 13, 2024
As part of its attack on our nation’s institutions, the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 plans to split the CDC into two organizations and kneecap its ability to issue public messaging and health recommendations. Kennedy’s latest involvement in MAGA world, with his “Make America Healthy Again” campaign, is merely marketing their goal of replacing public health officials at institutions like the FDA, CDC, and NIH with sycophants in line with Project 2025.
The Project — from which Trump bent double to distance himself, in spite of its genesis from among a cadre of his own former staffers — brazenly proclaims the pandemic to have revealed the CDC “as perhaps the most incompetent and arrogant agency in the federal government,” codifies COVID-19 misinformation about excess deaths due to lockdowns, and states that “never again should CDC officials be allowed to say in their official capacity that school children ‘should be’ masked or vaccinated (through a schedule or otherwise) or prohibited from learning in a school building.”
Schools were shown to have been a major source of viral spread, and an HSSCP hearing on the impact of school closures — featuring the aforementioned Zweig — was rife with party-line misinformation, using children as political pawns, as has become all too common a strategy from the MAGA GOP, while ignoring some very real pediatric medical harm caused by COVID-19.
This attack on public health extends to abortion/women’s health and Medicare, and runs alongside major swings at civil rights and climate science efforts in Project 2025. This is a frightening and frankly unsafe future — with decades of undone policy progress — that we risk passing on to the next generation. And it’s already having an impact: Last year, FDA Commissioner Dr. Robert Califf spoke out about how health misinformation is lowering life expectancy in the US.
Disturbingly, a Heritage-funded effort called Sovereignty 2025 is compiling “a list of federal workers it suspects could resist Trump plans.” This comes as Trump — who was just granted immunity by the Supreme Court — has recently casually posted about military tribunals for political enemies, and as the Heritage president, Kevin Roberts, has been threatening violence if the Left tries to obstruct their “revolution.”
What has been happening lately in the HSSCP with the targeting of scientists should be viewed as a preview of how expertise would be treated under a second Trump administration — and a grave warning for the nation.
Marjorie Taylor Greene Greene disrespects Fauci: "Mr Fauci — because you're not 'doctor' — you're Mr. Fauci in my few minutes. No, I don't need your answer … he belongs in prison" pic.twitter.com/vyBBc2N5zd
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 3, 2024
The historically nonpartisan scientific institutions did not ask to have politics thrust upon them and it is deeply troubling that physicians aligned with right-wing politics — including some of the Republican members of the HSSCP and their “experts” — have aided in this attack over the last four years. But for the sake of the future of public health in America, the overwhelmingly science-based medical community must join those who have taken a stand against the anti-science aggression of Trump World. But they cannot do it alone and must be supported by non-MAGA-aligned politicians, the media, and the public at the polls.
Because our government, as it currently stands, is not going to conduct the COVID-19 outbreak post-mortem the polarized country desperately needs and deserves ahead of November. Writing over Trump’s disastrous pandemic history appears to be part of the GOP’s 2024 strategy to get him reelected and fully realize their Project 2025 plan. For the sake of science and so much more, we cannot let them.
