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Trump dismissed warnings about the coronavirus in January 2020, according to a new reserve.
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Then-HHS Secretary Alex Azar tried using to notify Trump about the menace of COVID-19 in a phone simply call.
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“Yeah, alright,” Trump responded, then hung up.
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Then-President Donald Trump slash the dialogue limited when his health secretary, Alex Azar, warned him of the coronavirus in January 2020, in accordance to a new e-book, “Nightmare State of affairs: Inside of the Trump Administration’s Response to the Pandemic That Modified Background,” by The Washington Post’s Damian Paletta and Yasmeen Abutaleb.
The president was at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida at the time, a vacation that took put around a thirty day period soon after the Household impeached him in excess of his initiatives to solicit Ukraine’s interference in the 2020 election. The Senate was readying his demo. Trump aides thought the president needed cheering up and despatched him off to West Palm Beach, the guide says.
In the meantime, wellbeing staffers in his administration ended up rising more and more involved in excess of COVID-19, in accordance to the e book.
“Mr. President, I have received to convey to you anything,” Azar explained to Trump in the course of a mid-January 2020 cell phone contact, right before COVID-19 broke out across the place and compelled officers to impose lockdowns. “There’s this new virus out of China that could be really harmful. It could be the kind of factor we have been getting ready for and nervous about.”
Azar then relayed to Trump that the Centers for Sickness Control and Prevention had started out to display travelers from China to the US but that supplemental basic safety actions probably required to be taken to mitigate possible unfold of the virus, for each the e-book.
“Yeah, okay,” Trump replied, seemingly unconvinced of the threat. Then he hung up the phone.
Azar, then the head of the Well being and Human Solutions Office, failed to get by to the president. He experienced been on shaky ground with Trump, who was even now upset about a current health coverage that banned most flavored digital cigarettes. The move experienced angered Trump’s base, and the president considered it would price tag him his reelection, in accordance to the reserve.
The Submit journalists described that Azar “could barely get a term in in advance of Trump began shouting” at him over e-cigarettes in the course of that January phone phone.
That same month, Trump dismissed Azar’s guidance on a different situation, in accordance to the book. Trump needed to deliver a tweet praising Chinese President Xi Jinping on the pandemic, while Azar begged him not to.
“For the love of God, do not do that,” he instructed the president, for every the e-book. But Trump went forward and tweeted.
In the adhering to months, as COVID-19 bacterial infections and deaths surged across the US, Trump ongoing to dismiss information from his own administration. Trump and his shut allies would also frequently downplay the severity of the outbreak and flout tips like mask donning and social distancing. More than 400,000 Us residents died of COVID-19 through his administration.
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