Birx: 130,000 Americans Would Be Alive Today If Trump Hadn’t Been “Distracted” by the Election

As America learned last year, one of the many problems with electing an anti-science megalomanic who doesn’t read, won’t listen, and thinks windmills cause cancer is that when a highly contagious virus comes around killing people with alarming speed, he’s the last person you want in charge. A brief, in no way conclusive list of the ways Donald Trump reportedly made the COVID-19 situation worse in the U.S. includes but is in no way limited to:

And while no moment in his presidency would have been an ideal time for the pandemic, according to Deborah Birx, M.D., the timing of the COVID crisis was extra unfortunate given that it coincided with the 2020 election, which Team Trump was apparently more focused on than saving people‘s lives. How unfortunate? 130,000-people-would-have-been-alive-today unfortunate. Per The Washington Post:

The Trump administration was “distracted” by last year’s election and ignored recommendations to curb the pandemic, the White House’s former coronavirus response coordinator told congressional investigators this month. “I felt like the White House had gotten somewhat complacent through the campaign season,” said Deborah Birx, who President Donald Trump chose in March 2020 to steer his government’s virus response, according to interview excerpts released by the House select subcommittee on the pandemic. Birx, who sat for interviews with the subcommittee on Oct. 12 and 13, also detailed advice that she said the White House ignored late last year, including more aggressively testing younger Americans, expanding access to virus treatments, and better distributing vaccine doses in long-term care facilities.

More than 130,000 American lives could have been saved with swifter action and better coordinated public health messages after the virus’s first wave, Birx told investigators.

“I believe if we had fully implemented the mask mandates, the reduction in indoor dining, the getting friends and family to understand the risk of gathering in private homes, and we had increased testing, that we probably could have decreased fatalities into the 30-percent-less to 40-percent-less range,” Birx said. More than 735,000 Americans have died of coronavirus-related complications since the pandemic began, including more than 300,000 since President Joe Biden took office.

Asked to elaborate on comments she made to reporters earlier this year about the difficulty of dealing with the pandemic amidst the election, Birx told the subcommittee that some administration officials “were actively campaigning and not as present in the White House as previously.” The election year, she said, “just took people’s time away from and distracted them away from the pandemic in my personal opinion.” Asked if the ex-president “did everything he could to try to mitigate the spread of the virus and save lives during the pandemic,” Birx responded, “No,” adding, “I’ve said that to the White House in general, and I believe I was very clear to the president in specifics of what I needed him to do.”

Birx is not the first former Trump official to note that politics took precedence over fighting COVID-19, the Post noted; Steven Hatfill, who was a White House coronavirus adviser, told colleagues that Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election also distracted the administration from dealing with the virus last winter. “The Trump White House’s prioritization of election-year politics over the pandemic response—even as cases surged last fall—is among the worst failures of leadership in American history,” Representative James E. Clyburn, who chairs the subcommittee, said in a statement.

Naturally, Team Trump denies all of this because, like the 45th president, they live in a fantasy world in which his response to the pandemic was “a 10.” In a statement, Liz Harrington, a Trump spokeswoman, told the Post: “President Trump led an unprecedented effort to successfully combat the coronavirus, delivering PPE, hospital beds, treatments, and three vaccines in record time. Unfortunately, this approach was not taken up by the current government, and more lives have been lost from covid this year than the entirety of 2020, which the Fake News media places no blame onto Joe Biden.”

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