Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
A Story Of Desperation And Dysfunction: 34 Days Inside The White House's Coronavirus Response
The Washington Post: 34 Days Of Pandemic: Inside Trump's Attempts To Reopen America
The epidemiological models under review in the White House Situation Room in late March were bracing. In a best-case scenario, they showed the novel coronavirus was likely to kill between 100,000 and 240,000 Americans. President Trump was apprehensive about so much carnage on his watch, yet also impatient to reopen the economy — and he wanted data to justify doing so. So the White House considered its own analysis. A small team led by Kevin Hassett — a former chairman of Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers with no background in infectious diseases — quietly built an econometric model to guide response operations. (Rucker, Dawsey, Abutaleb, Costa and Sun, 5/2)
Politico: In China, A Struggling America Looks Like ‘The Disaster Flick Of 2020’
In March 29, President Donald Trump stood in the Rose Garden and offered a coronavirus forecast: “If we have between 100,000 and 200,000 [deaths],” he told a reporter, “we all, together, have done a very good job.” The president meant it as self-congratulation; he’d been shown a projected American death toll as high as 2.2 million. But in China, the statement landed very differently. On Weibo, the country’s equivalent of Twitter, Trump’s declaration sounded like an astonishing statement of defeat by China’s major geopolitical rival. (Wertime, 5/4)
And a look at how the previous administration handled a potential outbreak —
Politico: ‘It Just Had To Do With Luck’: Inside Biden’s Struggle To Contain The H1N1 Virus
It was April 2009 and the three-month-old Obama administration was desperately grappling with the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression when homeland security adviser John Brennan arrived at the Oval Office to warn the president and Vice President Joe Biden of a new crisis: H1N1, the “swine flu,” was showing signs of rapid spread in Mexico, while cases were popping up in California and Texas. Brennan pointed out that the Spanish flu — the deadliest pandemic in U.S. history — was an H1N1 strain. “It made their eyebrows go up,” Brennan says now, recalling Biden’s reaction in particular. (Korecki, 5/4)
