“One of the biggest problems with this pandemic response was there was no one in charge. That had been an element of the Trump White House in the three previous years- he didn’t let anyone get too powerful.”
Yasmeen Abutaleb is a national reporter at The Washington Post, covering health policy, with a focus on the Department of Health and Human Services, health policy on Capitol Hill and health care in politics. She previously covered health care for Reuters. Damian Paletta is White House economic policy reporter for The Washington Post. Before joining The Post, he covered the White House for the Wall Street Journal.
Yasmeen Abutaleb and Damian Paletta detail many of the major missteps from the Trump administration’s pandemic response, including shelving a ready-made plan to ship masks to every American household. Abutaleb and Paletta highlight Trump’s contradictions in his call for vaccine credit while refusing to advocate seriously for his followers to take it. They note some of the ways a power vacuum in the White House left a pandemic response void and how public health officials like Dr. Fauci have been demonized and threatened.
LISTEN AND SUBSCRIBE
SPEAKERS
Yasmeen Abutaleb
National Reporter
The Washington Post
Damian Paletta
White House Economic Policy Reporter
The Washington Post
TIMESTAMPS
0:00 - Intro
3:17 - Pandemic missteps
6:35 - Trump administration’s war on science
9:48 - Operation Warp Speed and Trump base’s contradiction
14:17 - Anthony Fauci demonization and conspiracies
19:39 - Vaccine safety and convincing those who are hesitant
25:44 - Who was really in charge of the pandemic response in Trump administration?
30:45 - Establishing a record of Trump White House pandemic response
35:31 - Evaluating US public health agencies’ responses
39:50 - Missed opportunities to prevent death and economic fallout
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
John Darsie: (00:07)
Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Salt Talks. My name is John Darsie. I'm the managing director of Salt, which is a global thought leadership forum and networking platform at the intersection of finance, technology, and public policy. Salt Talks are a digital interview series with leading investors, creators and thinkers. And our goal on these talks is the same as our goal at our Salt conferences, which we're excited to hopefully resume here in September of 2021. And that's to provide a window into the mind of subject matter experts, as well as provide a platform for what we think are big ideas that are shaping the future. We're very excited today to welcome two fantastic journalists and authors to Salt Talks, they're out with a recent book about the Trump administration's response to the pandemic crisis. Yasmeen Abutaleb is a national reporter at the Washington Post covering health policy with a focus on the department of health and human services, health policy on Capitol Hill, and health care in politics.
John Darsie: (01:06)
Interesting beat to be on over the last 18 months to say the least. Damian Paletta is the White House economic policy reporter for The Washington Post. Before joining the Post, he covered the White House for the Wall Street Journal. The new book that these two co authored is called Nightmare Scenario: Inside the Trump Administration's Response to the Pandemic That Changed History. And I think as this entire wave of Trump books has come out, I think a lot of them there's a little bit of staleness to a lot of the content. We know that the administration was chaotic and incompetent, and politicized in many ways. But I think this book, very unique in the way it tackles the politics of the pandemic, and why it ended up being such a disaster that it was for the country.
John Darsie: (01:49)
But hosting today's talk is Anthony Scaramucci, who's the founder and managing partner of SkyBridge capital, which is a global alternative investment firm. I have to mention since we're talking about politics and public policy, that Anthony did spend 11 days within the Trump administration, as communications director, but with that, I'll turn it over to Anthony for the interview.
Anthony Scaramucci: (02:07)
So, you see, he's trying to knock me down a peg Yasmeen, you see what he's doing? Okay. That just, "Oh, he got fired from the White House after 11 days."
John Darsie: (02:17)
I didn't say fired. I said you spent 11 days-
Anthony Scaramucci: (02:21)
Let me just tell you something, okay? It's okay to do this in July, but I just want to let you know, I decide bonuses sometime around Thanksgiving. So you better stop between now and Thanksgiving, just let you know that.
Damian Paletta: (02:31)
He might have raised you up a peg actually by saying that you got out so quick.
Anthony Scaramucci: (02:35)
Well, yeah, it might have raised me up a peg that in fact I got fired.
John Darsie: (02:38)
It's a badge of honor at this point.
Anthony Scaramucci: (02:40)
Let's talk about this book, which is an incredible book, you guys did a brilliant job. And I started out by saying that a lot of it is hard to believe. Okay. So, let's start with you met Yasmeen. You wrote the book, Damian, you guys wrote the book. But when you're reading parts of it in terms of policies and decision making, it's like, "Oh, God, how could that have been made like that?" Tell us one of the more outrageous things that happened that you were like, "Okay, I can't believe I'm writing this, but it is factual, and so therefore I'm writing."
Yasmeen Abutaleb: (03:16)
I think one of the most devastating incidents Damian and I came across was this plan that a top health official had proposed to send a mask to every American household. They wanted to send a packet of five masks to every house in the US. And this official, Bob Kadlec, who was the head of emergency preparedness at the Health and Human Services Department, had already worked with a couple of undergarment manufacturers like, Jockey and Hanes, and the plan was that they were going to manufacture 650 million masks by sometime in May. And the goal was for the government to send these masks to everyone through the US Postal Service, which is an important detail for later. And that way you just depoliticize this whole thing. Obviously wearing masks was a pretty new concept to Americans. And they wanted to say, this recommendation's coming from the president, it's coming from the White House, just do this to protect yourself and protect your neighbor.
Yasmeen Abutaleb: (04:21)
And that plan got shot down in the task force for a couple of reasons. One was the vice president's chief of staff Mark Short, did not like that. He felt that Kadlec was freelancing, that he had sort of done this without going through the normal processes at the Office of Management and Budget. And part of the reason for that was because I think Kadlec knew it would probably get killed if he went through the process that way. And also that they didn't want to be alarmist, this was in late March, by sending masks to everyone. And even though the health officials had coalesced around recommending that all Americans wear masks, some of the political officials still were not on board with this and were afraid of how Trump's base might react. And so this was pulled off the agenda. Mark Short made sure it never got back on. And another part of the reason it got killed was because there was concerned that the President was not going to go for a plan that relied on the US Postal Service, because at the time, he was waging a war against the Postal Service.
Yasmeen Abutaleb: (05:18)
We're worried about mailing ballots ahead of the election. And so, Damian and I thought this was such a great example of the completely disastrous policymaking process throughout the response. It's not going through normal channels, it's yanked off the agenda not even discussed for political reasons. There's this President's weird aversion to the postal service. And so this whole plan gets mixed. And it's one of those moments where you just wonder how different things would have gone if in March and April and May, the government was just sending people masks and it was not turned into this political cudgel.
Anthony Scaramucci: (05:52)
So, Damian, you and I've talked before, let me hold up the book here, I've got it here on my phone, because I left it unfortunately on my nightstand last night. It's a brilliant book, it goes in depth detail on what happened and how many avoidable things there were. But to me Damian, one of the most alarming things in the book, and correct me if I'm wrong, it feels like the administration was waging an all out war against the medical and scientific community in the United States. That's the thing I got out of the book. And so why, Damian?
Damian Paletta: (06:31)
Well-
Anthony Scaramucci: (06:32)
Do I have that right first of all, and then secondarily why if I do?
Damian Paletta: (06:35)
Yes, absolutely. And it's I think one of the worst legacies. Obviously, the death of 600,000 people is a terrible, terrible legacy of this. But one of the worst legacies, is what we're living through now, which is that the President by attacking the scientists and medical professionals, has ceded all this distrust to this day in vaccines and science. So, not only is he... He's out of office, he's gone, right? He's lost his Twitter account. But there's still millions and millions of people who believe this mindset that he kind of implanted in them, which is, "I'm right, the scientists are wrong, believe me, don't believe them." And I think it really got started in the early days of this when to his credit, Azar, and obviously, Fauci and Birx and others were warning that this could be really bad.
Damian Paletta: (07:24)
And the President was so used to deflecting every crisis that came his way, whether it was the impeachment, or all these scandals with women and stuff, everything just sort of kind of fell off his back, he was like Teflon, and he said this would be gone in 15 days, there's just a few cases, when it gets warmer it's going to go away again. He was creating this counter narrative to all the science. And that got harder obviously, as the virus really sunk its teeth into the country. And so instead of kind of reversing course, or acknowledging, "Hey, the scientists were right, I was wrong," he just kind of doubled and tripled down. He brought in Scott Atlas and other people who would kind of reaffirm his beliefs that this was just like the flu. And there came a point when it was just too late to change course. Obviously, one of the biggest moments of this the best example, sadly, was when he got sick and nearly died.
Damian Paletta: (08:17)
He did not wear a mask, he packed the White House with people. He was a month from the election and his poll numbers were bad. So he was doing whatever, he could just kind of send this image that he was indestructible and the country's indestructible, and obviously, the virus got him and it got him bad. And over that weekend, Yasmeen and I report in the book, the doctors... The red field and others met and talked and said, "Well, let's pray that this is the moment, the kind of epiphany that he's needed to see how dangerous this is." And they thought there's no way this guy could be on the brink of death and emerge with the same kind of cavalier attitude about it. And sure enough, the whole world watched as he walked up the steps and took up the mask and said, "Don't be afraid." Read fields heart sank and a lot of other people thought, "Well, there's no way he's going to reverse course, now he's just going to drive us off the ledge." And that's what ended up happening.
Anthony Scaramucci: (09:10)
So, Yasmeen, explain this to me, because you write about it eloquently in the book, you guys do Operation Warp Speed, very successful, it was actually a great idea to funnel money out to the different pharmaceutical companies to backstop their risk taking to expedite the vaccine for the virus, and yet, they Trumpers, they don't want to take vac... So he should get credit for Operation Warp Speed, but at the same time, we're not going to take the vaccine that he should get credit for. So, can you square the circle for me?
Yasmeen Abutaleb: (09:48)
I wish I could. So, I think there's a couple different pieces to that. Yes, he deserves credit for Operation Warp Speed, as does his administration. And it's kind of funny in this ironic way, because the vaccine was probably the hardest thing to do, and to get it done in record time. And it's the one thing they did successfully. So, it's kind of heartbreaking in a way, because you wonder if they had brought the same level of focus and energy and resources to other parts of the response, how things might have gone differently. But yes, they decided to make this massive investment, to take out the financial risk for these companies so that they could just throw everything they had into the R&D of the vaccine. They helped them get access to manufacturing facilities that they could manufacture doses of vaccine before they knew if they worked to basically to get rid of lags in the whole process.
Yasmeen Abutaleb: (10:42)
But the President, while he does deserve credit for the administration taking this on, undercut confidence in the vaccine at every step of the way, because it became clear by the summer of 2020, and especially into the fall, as we got closer to the election, that he was berating the FDA to move faster on the vaccine, he made it clear and completely explicit terms that he wanted it before the election. And you could see in public polls, how much trust was falling in this whole process. You're already asking people to really trust that the FDA knows what it's doing because the fastest vaccine before this one had been developed in four years. Now, we're looking at one developed in under a year, so people need to feel assured that the FDA is not cutting corners, that it's doing a full safety and effectiveness evaluation. And if they feel like it's being done for political purposes, that's just going to undercut trust more and more. But unlike the Vice President, Dr. Fauci, a number of his administration officials, the President did not get vaccinated on TV, he did not sort of give a public display of confidence in the vaccine in that way, we found out-
Anthony Scaramucci: (11:51)
Why?
Yasmeen Abutaleb: (11:53)
Well, he has a complicated history with vaccine. So, a lot of his base are anti-vaxxers, they don't believe in this. They're fueling a number of conspiracy theories about the vaccine. You can see on Fox News every night, Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity who has changed his tune somewhat, are railing against vaccination campaigns and trying to get people vaccinated. So there's this dual thing of him wanting the vaccine before the election because he thinks it will give people confidence the virus will go away, but also not wanting to alienate that portion of his base. And he also has his own complicated view on vaccines. He's kind of flirted with anti-vaccine views in the past. And if he didn't get vac-
Anthony Scaramucci: (12:34)
Yeah. And he thinks it's experitorial, he throws out there. It's like a doorframe log, anything that you can throw sows the seeds of distrust he'll throw it out there. I'm sorry, but go ahead.
Yasmeen Abutaleb: (12:45)
Well, to your point when you were asking the question, there's this dual thing of wanting credit for the vaccines, but also not doing anything to help more people get vaccinated. What a lot of I think doctors including Dr. Fauci learned last year was that Trump supporters really hang on his every word. So you just have to wonder how many more people would get vaccinated among the holdouts right now, if the President had, A, gotten vaccinated on TV, and B, was out there right now saying, "This was such a big accomplishment of my administration, you should go out and get the vaccine. It's safe and effective." But of course, we're not seeing that happen.
Damian Paletta: (13:21)
I would just add to that, Anthony. There's actually no evidence that he has been vaccinated. Okay? He said it on Fox News on a radio interview. There's no photograph, as he has been said, there's no doctor Who said anything. I think this kind of allows his supporters to-
Anthony Scaramucci: (13:39)
You've never met a bigger baby than this guy, trust me, he's been vaccinated. Okay? He's a big, big, baby. I guarantee that he's been vaccinated with or without his diaper. I'm not sure. But let's go to a question that's important to me. This is the Rand Paul, Anthony Fauci squaring off on each other. So, go ahead. Obviously, I'm biased, so you have to forgive me. I know Anthony Fauci a long time, [inaudible 00:14:08] rumors around respect for him. And I think that Rand Paul wears a tinfoil hat to work. But go ahead. You tell me what's going on there.
Damian Paletta: (14:18)
Well, I would just... The opening scene of the book is from August 2020, when Fauci takes a letter that he received in his house and opens it in his office with a letter opener and all this white powder kind of explodes all over his face. And he screams for security, they have to strip them down, essentially naked and decontaminate him. They thought it could be ricin or anthrax. There were a lot of people who wanted to hurt this guy. And in part, it was because of people like Rand Paul and President Trump, who were just you know, demonizing him and alleging that he was destroying the country. I think the threats against Fauci have only gotten worse since the inauguration of Biden. A lot of people including Rand Paul, have essentially suggested it was all Fauci's fault that Biden won, that Trump lost. Rand Paul, I think was one of the first members of Congress to get Coronavirus. He's still refuse to wear a mask. He is kind of an outlier in terms of Congress in his thinking on the Fed and the economy.
Damian Paletta: (15:19)
But there are many millions of people who agree with his conspiracy theory that Fauci created the virus in cahoots with the Chinese and this kind of stuff. It's completely out of this world crazy, but he continues to feed it. And I think Fauci does go toe to toe with him. A lot of people on Capitol Hill when they testify, will be careful not to be too adversarial. But Fauci, you can see how pissed he is that this guy has the nerve, this doctor no less has the nerve to question him. Yasmeen and I, we've talked about it a lot. It's not going to go away. And Fauci is not going to back down and this guys 80 years old, and he visibly pissed.
Anthony Scaramucci: (16:03)
But I mean-
Yasmeen Abutaleb: (16:04)
And I think...
Anthony Scaramucci: (16:06)
Well, let's talk for our viewers benefit. Yasmeen, what are the allegations that Senator Paul is making? And then what is the refutation of those allegations?
Yasmeen Abutaleb: (16:18)
So a lot of this, and Senator Paul started this last spring. And it's just the theme in all these hearings whenever Fauci appears before the Senate Health Committee, that the virus may have accidentally escaped or was engineered in a lab in Wuhan, that the NIH had indirectly had provided some funding to. So, the short version of it is, there's no evidence that the virus was deliberately engineered and unleashed on the world. That's been pretty clearly shot down. There are still questions about whether it may have accidentally leaked out of the lab and started an outbreak that way. And the way it accidentally leaked is it maybe infects a lab worker, and the outbreak goes from there. And what happened was the NIH had provided this grant to a New York group called Eco Health Alliance back in 2014. And part of that grant went to the Wuhan lab, because they are one of the top labs in the world one of two or three on coronaviruses, because so many of them originate in China.
Yasmeen Abutaleb: (17:17)
So, there are all these allegations that the NIH funded the Wuhan lab and of course, there are some right wing conspiracy theorists who have taken that several steps further, said Dr. Fauci, worked with the Wuhan lab to create the virus and unleash it which of course, is nonsense, that the root of this is that a sub grant from the NIH went to the Wuhan lab, and it's like a $600,000 grant. And that grant was actually suspended last year when these questions started circulating about the origins of the virus, which we still don't know. But Senator Paul, in every hearing, insist on bringing this up. And then the hearing just a few days ago, he took it further than he ever has by accusing Fauci of perjuring himself by lying to Congress. And that's when you saw Fauci really kind of stand up and defend himself because he said, "I've never lied." He said, "If anyone was lying, it was Senator Paul."
Yasmeen Abutaleb: (18:11)
Because Senator Paul was trying to imply or not even imply, just state that Fauci had lied to Congress by saying that the NIH had not funded what's called gain of function research at the Wuhan lab, which there's no way to know whether the lab was conducting it or not, but the NIH grant was not approved for those purposes.
Anthony Scaramucci: (18:32)
So, I know John has a ton of questions for you guys. But I have one more question that's bothering me a lot. And I want to get both of your reactions to. I have family members that won't get vaccinated. I have school teacher friends of mine that will not get vaccinated. I came in this morning to a litany of email death threats, because I was on CNBC last Friday telling people they have to get vaccinated if they want to come to our conference if they want to work here at SkyBridge. And so now I'm a fascist for wanting to be vaccinated. But when we were fighting the Nazis in World War Two, we had a draft mandate, and everybody had to go to the drip.
Anthony Scaramucci: (19:11)
All we're asking people to do now is to take a jab to protect their fellow men and women. So what am I getting wrong? Are these vaccines... This is a question for both you, two part question. Are these vaccines safe? Yes or no? And why? And then secondarily, what can we do if they are safe? And I believe that they are. What can we do to change the hearts and minds of these people? So let's start with you, Damien. Are these vaccines safe? Yes or no?
Damian Paletta: (19:40)
I think the vaccines are absolutely safe. At this point, they've administered more than 100 million in the United States. Okay. There have been some cases that required more study, but there wasn't anything that made them feel like they were unsafe. There are some breakthrough cases now we're hearing about. When you have a vaccine that's miraculously 95% effective, that 5%, when you do more than 100 million people, there's still going to be people who become sick, but they don't tend to... The symptoms are better and it's less severe. So, yes, the vaccine is safe.
Anthony Scaramucci: (20:16)
Is there a microchip in the vaccine-
Damian Paletta: (20:18)
No.
Anthony Scaramucci: (20:19)
... where the government's monitoring you?
Damian Paletta: (20:21)
No, but-
Anthony Scaramucci: (20:22)
Is it genetically altering your DNA, so you're going to-
Damian Paletta: (20:26)
No.
Anthony Scaramucci: (20:27)
... turn into something that's not human?
Damian Paletta: (20:29)
It is not. It is a vaccine, the kind of vaccine that you've been given since you were six months old, you've been getting vaccines, okay? It's the top scientists in the world, it really is a miracle that they were able to do this in under a year. And there's literally more than 100 million people who have gotten one of three different shots in the past six months in this country, and are participating in society and healthy and running and playing basketball and baseball, and everything's going... And having babies and everything is working like it should. Now, it seems like a ridiculous thing when you mentioned microchips. Okay? But there was a recent survey that was done that said of the people who refuse to get vaccinated, more than 50% Anthony, believe that there is some kind of microchip that's being inserted. Okay? It's such a ridiculous thing to... I'm not being elitist.
Anthony Scaramucci: (21:30)
No. But I look, I grew up in a blue collar family, these people distrust... You have to understand the blue collar people feel they've been left out of the system. So, they distrust the system and they distrust the establishment. Let me... Yasmeen, let me ask you this question because I just want to get your view on it. What do you say to somebody that's not vaccinated? I'm sure you've met them. Maybe you have them in your... I have them in my family. So, what do you say?
Yasmeen Abutaleb: (21:57)
Yeah, I think all of us have people in our families or in our friend groups who are not getting vaccinated for any number of reasons. I think one thing that's really important is to not be condescending to people who are not getting it for one reason or another, but just explaining to them why they should trust it, the process that it had to go through to be evaluated as safe and effective. Why it's not going to... That people are seriously concerned it's going to alter your DNA. And there's a simple answer to that-
Anthony Scaramucci: (22:26)
Is it going to make people infertile?
Yasmeen Abutaleb: (22:28)
No, it's not. And I've had friends who are six, seven.eight months pregnant, getting the vaccine in the third trimester of their pregnancy, they all delivered healthy babies, people who got the vaccine before they got pregnant, one of my friends got it just a couple months before she got pregnant, and now she's pregnant. So, there's no effect on fertility. It's been studied, it will continue to be studied. And I think like Damien said, we've now seen it administered in hundreds of millions of people. I think one thing that's important to understand about vaccines, is for every vaccine on the market, there are adverse events, we just normally don't pay as close attention to other vaccines, because they don't have the same kind of historic nature of this one. This one's kind of unique in that we're all getting it no matter what age group at the same time, as opposed to childhood vaccines or late adulthood ones or whatever they might be.
Yasmeen Abutaleb: (23:20)
So, I think it's important to understand what a particular person's concerns are, if it's that their DNA is going to be altered, I think people are mixing of DNA and mRNA, which is what the Pfizer and Madonna vaccines are. So, you can just simply tell them, it's actually an mRNA vaccine, it has nothing to do with your DNA, there is no concern that your DNA is going to be altered. On the microchip piece of it, I know that that's a serious concern that people have, I think you have to explain why that's just not a possibility. You can't put a microchip in a vaccine vial. And that would never be approved by the FDA, you can't secretly do that kind of thing. So, I think a lot of this is just a lack of trust in the process, a lack of trust in the FDA and our public institutions for the reasons that you stated that people feel like they've been left behind. So, I think it's important to meet people where they are and address their concerns head on, not just keep yelling at them that it's safe and effective, safe and effective.
Anthony Scaramucci: (24:16)
Yeah. I take your point because it is a control thing for some people. You don't want to sound condescending, you need to get them to make an informed choice. I'm going to turn it over to John Darsie, who's got a series of questions and he gets a lot of attention because he gets fan mail. I get hate mail. People are threatening to kill me because I'm a pro-vaxxer, but John gets fan mail about these Salt Talks. And he always reminds me of the fan mail that he's getting. So, just do me a favor, when he asks a good question, don't say, "Oh, that's a really good question." Because it will upset me. Okay? Go ahead, Darsie. Go ahead.
John Darsie: (24:50)
I like to say that I indirectly get death threats directed at you into just our generic inboxes at SkyBridge and Salt. So-
Anthony Scaramucci: (24:58)
We get a lot of [inaudible 00:24:59] death threats too. Yeah.
John Darsie: (25:00)
Right.
Anthony Scaramucci: (25:01)
I want people to get vaccinated. I think they... Well, that's all. They get upset with me. Go ahead, John.
John Darsie: (25:06)
Yeah. So, one thing you guys tackled in the book that I think is fascinating and sort of symptomatic, if you will, of the way the Trump administration operated, is it who was really in charge of the pandemic response within the White House? Was it something that Trump was commanding control, and he was day to day in there, obviously, monitoring logistics around the vaccine development and response to the pandemic? Was Jared Kushner? Was it Mike Pence, who was initially put in charge of the task force? Who was the one that was really leading the charge, and ultimately, had some accountability about the response? And I'll start with you on that one, Damien.
Damian Paletta: (25:44)
I would say that no one was in charge. At any given point, the President was in charge briefly, Jared Kushner was in charge of getting masks and gowns briefly, Mike Pence was supposed to be in charge of the task force, but he was constantly being undermined. And he was kind of trying to deal with all these conflicting forces, whether they were political or health. Deborah Birx was in charge of certain things, but then she was dramatically undermined. And then Anthony Fauci, I think had a big role in messaging and did a lot behind the scenes with the vaccine and other things, but the White House did everything they could to keep him from being too powerful. Then you had Mark Meadows, who would come in when he could to kind of cut the legs out from under certain people when he thought they were getting too powerful, Alex Azar started out with a lot of power initially, but the White House kind of reined him in.
Damian Paletta: (26:38)
So I think one of the biggest problems with this whole response was that there was no one in charge. And unfortunately, that had kind of been an element of the Trump White House for the previous three years that worked for the president. He didn't let anyone get too powerful. There was a rotating cast of Chiefs of Staff, by not allowing anyone to become too important and play too much of a leadership role. It allowed him to kind of keep everyone on their toes, made people more sycophantic because they were always worried about how they would look in his eyes. And so in a case like this, when there was a public health crisis, when you needed truth and information delivered quickly, it was a huge part of the problem in the response.
John Darsie: (27:18)
Yasmeen, do you have anything to add to that?
Yasmeen Abutaleb: (27:23)
I think Damian hit on it. And we say this in the book. In many ways, it was designed so that no one was ever truly in charge. Because the president wanted to be able to append things or decide to do things differently at any point in time. And so, one of the... I think this was probably the most damaging element of the response, is that without leadership, people don't know who they're supposed to listen to, everyone can try to undercut each other and go behind each other's backs. And when you're fighting a virus this difficult and this lethal, you all have to kind of put aside your differences and unite to fight the virus. That is not what they were doing at all. And it's because at any point in time, people could come in and try to outwit each other or try to one up each other and take over the response.
Yasmeen Abutaleb: (28:07)
And you saw that happen multiple times a month. Like Damien said, you had Azar, and then you had Pence, and then you had Kushner for a little bit, and then Kushner left and then Birx never really had the autonomy she wanted. So it's just... In the end, it was just kind of this team of vipers all vying to see who would come out on top.
John Darsie: (28:27)
Right. And it's almost as if at this point in the administration's lifecycle, that everybody had been hollowed out from the administration, who had the gumption to challenge the President and to tell him hard truths. And it's almost like we worried for four years about a bonafide crisis bubbling up that the Trump administration with all of its issues would have to deal with. We got one in the last year of his presidency at a time when he was surrounded all sort of by yes men that just wanted to save their own skin, rather than serve the public good. Is that an accurate assessment, Damien?
Damian Paletta: (29:03)
Absolutely. And I think, Kelly's gone, Tillerson's gone, Meadows is gone, a lot of the people who were kind of tough enough to stand up to him, obviously... Nielsen was gone, the people who weren't necessarily going to do whatever he said, had been pushed out. And so, I was actually just thinking, Anthony mentioned, we talked a lot about vaccines, as we should continue to talk for months. But one of... If you remember that moment in March, when they finally agreed as a taskforce that they should advocate for people to wear masks.
Damian Paletta: (29:33)
And then the President goes up to make the announcement and says, "Well, I'm not gonna wear one, it's voluntary." So then, the country's like, "Well, who do we believe? Do we believe Fauci? Who a lot of the country believed at the time, or do we believe when the president says he's not going to wear one, and we love him, maybe we shouldn't wear one either. And it was that kind of stuff. The lack of a single person kind of delivering a specific message that has plagued the process to this day.
John Darsie: (29:58)
Right. And the point you were making earlier Damian about there being no concrete evidence or testimony from a doctor about Trump getting a vaccine, I thought was very interesting, and one that I've never thought about before. And he sort of takes that approach with a lot of different issues, whether it be things like immigration and racism, he winks at certain things without fully endorsing them to sort of allow him to play both sides of the coin. So, in this case, I guess you were saying that there's no hard evidence of him getting vaccinated, but he says he got vaccinated. So if he gets challenged on it, he can say, "Well, I got vaccinated, why are you blaming me?" But at the same time, the vaccine hesitant and the conspiratorial side of his base, can still say, "Oh, he didn't actually mean it. He's just trying to appease sort of the woke movement by saying that he got vaccinated." Is that sort of what you were hinting at?
Damian Paletta: (30:45)
Exactly. And I think as you guys know, with the challenge of writing this book, Yasmeen and I felt really strongly that there had to be a book about the pandemic response. There's a lot of Trump books about different things and there should be, but there needed to be a specific book about the response. So, one of our biggest challenges was, Well, what do we know? There was so much misinformation and lying and deception, we really wanted to break down what we knew. And so when we reconstructed that weekend that he was sick, we really spent a ton of time going to different people to try to find out what exactly happened, who exactly was talking to who, how sick was he really? Because you can't trust the things that were coming out of his mouth or some of his senior aids mouths, we really thought it was important almost as a historical document, to really find out exactly what happened.
Damian Paletta: (31:36)
And so when he says on a Tuesday night at 9:30 on Fox News that he got vaccinated, well, it's up to us to try to find out whether he can back that up. And by not backing that up whether he was or he wasn't, people can interpret it however they want to interpret it. And obvious, months later they have.
John Darsie: (31:54)
Yasmeen, how hard was that reporting around his visit to the hospital when he was infected with COVID? It was the first time that I had seen a detailed in depth reporting of those events that matched up with some things that we had heard from other sources, but nobody in the media had written about all those inner workings of that visit, and just how close he might have been to dying from COVID, which obviously would have thrown the country into chaos. But how hard was that reporting relative to other things that you guys have reported on within the Trump administration?
Yasmeen Abutaleb: (32:27)
It was really difficult because at the end of the day, it was a national security failure, right? They didn't protect the president. That's a complete dereliction of duty. And they had the tools they needed to protect him, but they just refused, including the President refused to use them, whether it was masks or regular testing at the White House or using more reliable tests. So, Damian and I were reporting for the Post at the time. And I remember reporting on that weekend, we could not get clear answers, we really did not know what was going on. We tried for weeks, and then of course it was the election before we knew it. But when we were recording that weekend and the days following, we kept asking the White House, "Are you contact tracing to try to find out where the President got the infection from and where everyone else got the infection from? Which event was the super spreader event?" But people thought it was the big event they had had in the Rose Garden for Amy Coney Barrett's Supreme Court nomination.
Yasmeen Abutaleb: (33:27)
And the White House was getting so annoyed at those questions, because they were like, "Why are you asking us for the third day in a row for contact tracing? It's over, the investigations over." And I think that was just such a clear indication of that they really didn't want the answers to these questions. He got out of the hospital, he made it through. So it was really hard to get answers, and Damien and I couldn't actually get them until pretty close to when we were wrapping up the book, because a lot of the people who actually did know about the President's condition, and how sick he was and how the events unfolded that weekend, were not ready to talk about it until they knew he had lost the election. He was out of power, and that they were not going to go back in and work in the Trump administration or the next administration.
Yasmeen Abutaleb: (34:10)
So it was really only several weeks after the inauguration that we could start getting the people who actually knew to open up. Because it turned out a lot of his closest advisors themselves had no idea what was going on that weekend.
John Darsie: (34:25)
Right. Yeah, it was certainly a tight circle of people that I think understood the gravity of what was going on. You could piece it together based on certain treatments that he was getting, but there was no... You couldn't responsibly report it in something like the Washington Post without verifying some of those sources. But, Yasmeen, I have another question for you. And it's about the public health community. Obviously, they've done yeoman's work during the pandemic, Dr. Fauci has been sleeping four or five hours a night at most as he's helped us work through the pandemic and he's one of many people that have been instrumental in trying to limit the number of deaths and infections from COVID. But the CDC, the FDA, there's been certain periods of this pandemic that haven't necessarily covered themselves in glory, they've given out either confusing guidance, or they've had to backtrack on different recommendations they've given. We're obviously sort of in the heat of battle still right now when it comes to fighting COVID.
John Darsie: (35:15)
So I don't think there's going to be a lot of hand wringing right now. But how do you think long-term, we might sort of reevaluate the way these public health organizations operate in terms of maintaining consistency, accountability, and things like that?
Yasmeen Abutaleb: (35:31)
I'm so glad you asked that, because obviously, we spend a lot of time focusing on Trump. One of the strengths Damian and I thought of this book is that we've dive pretty deep into the health agencies and to other people who were involved in the response. The President's one of several characters throughout the book. So, I think this pandemic has really, really stress test the health agencies, especially the CDC and the FDA. And I think you're seeing the effects of that now still, even though Trump's not an office, they have a president who says he's going to follow the science and that they can go where the science leads them, they're still making a number of unforced errors and mistakes. And I think part of that is the fatigue of dealing with the pandemic for a year and a half. And also that they're not structured to deal with something like this. They're really not.
Yasmeen Abutaleb: (36:19)
The CDC was supposed to be the leader in the world, they really failed in this response in multiple ways. And a lot of that rests with Trump and political interference. But a lot of it also rests with the agency, just that it's a very slow moving agency, it is not designed to respond to such a fast moving virus like this, they were way too slow with a number of decisions, because they kind of rests on academic science, and they're not as good at moving in with real time data and not having the perfect academic data, but saying, "Okay, this is what we're seeing happening on the ground and this is what we should do now."Like with masks, with the test, with some of their guidances. You see, even now with them kind of wringing their hands over what to do about the masks guidance with the Delta variant. And the FDA had so many forced errors last year in authorizing hydroxychloroquine, with no evidence that it worked. And the doctors could already prescribe it if they wanted to, with this whole debacle over convalescent plasma.
Yasmeen Abutaleb: (37:19)
The reason they held firm on the vaccine, I think is because they had had so many disasters leading up to it, that they were like, "We're at risk of destroying this agency's 114 year reputation, if we don't hold firm on this." And they had seen the effects of making the wrong decision on these other treatments or rolling it out in the wrong way. So, they really didn't cut corners on the vaccine, which obviously was great. But you see them now still struggling with a number of things, and they have so much on their plate. So, I think hopefully people don't forget this pandemic too quickly, once we hopefully get through it. And really think about why our public institutions were not set up to respond very well to many parts of this crisis and what they need, whether it's, maybe the CDC has too much responsibility, maybe they need more flexibility, maybe the FDA needs to be structured differently. But I think there needs to be a number of sort of after action reports, hopefully some kind of congressional investigation to look at why the US public health institutions didn't do a better job.
John Darsie: (38:22)
Right. I think there's sort of a middle ground between sort of unbridled veneration of a lot of the agencies and the public figures that have led our response to the crisis that haven't always done the right thing and openly or questioning all institutions. I think, certainly some critical questions can be asked of certain agencies and people in regard to the response, but I don't think that means we should be questioning science at its heart. But I want to ask you a question for both of you sort of in the same vein, and it starts with Yasmeen. How many people and I know there's been public comment from various public health officials on this, but we have 600,000 plus people have died from COVID-19 in the United States. What's the number that if we had had a competent and rapid response to the pandemic, what's the realistic number that we could have hoped to limit it to in terms of the number of deaths? We'll start with that. And then Damien, they've always, I think the Trump administration, they looked at the economic impacts and the public health impact of COVID as distinct items.
John Darsie: (39:24)
It's like, "If we just keep things open, the economy will keep going." That was pretty much disproven, I think, people if they were going to get sick and potentially die, they weren't going to go out in public to restaurants and things like that. So what do you think the economic impact could have been? Let's say we had a competent response early on in the pandemic, what do you think the economic in terms of mitigating the economic impacts we could have had? We'll start with Yasmeen and then go to Damien on the second question.
Yasmeen Abutaleb: (39:51)
I will say they didn't say the good things to agencies did, but they did, they did a lot right too. I don't know that we know one exact number for how many fewer people would have died with a different response, because there's so many elements to it. There are studies that have shown if everyone had worn masks, you could have prevented I think 60,000 deaths or something around that by last August. And that would have been dramatically more for that devastating winter surge. So, I think it's safe to say hundreds of thousands of deaths could have been prevented with a better response with something as universal as... or as simple as just getting most people to wear masks. Mask wearing was great in some parts of the country and almost non existent in other parts.
Yasmeen Abutaleb: (40:34)
And then of course, I think consistent messaging would have made a really big difference, there's such a divide in how seriously people perceive the threat of the virus. And that affected what measures they were willing to take. And then of course, the fact that the US has a pretty poor safety net just made this exponentially more difficult for low income people, for essential workers who have to go into work. And then of course, for communities of color, black and Hispanic people were three times more likely to die than white people from the virus. So, there were a number of factors. But if there had been an administration paying attention to all of these issues, and continually stressing the need to wear masks that it had never gotten to the point it's gotten now, I think it is safe to say hundreds of thousands of deaths would have been prevented.
Damian Paletta: (41:23)
And on the economy, it's such a interesting question. I think what they did, and what they had to do at the time was an enormous amount of government assistance in March with the two trillion dollar Cares Act, and then they had to come back again, with another couple trillion dollars as the year went on. And so what they did in a way was they prevented... The stock market came back with the help of the Federal Reserve starting in late March of 2020 to now, where it's at record levels. Unfortunately, the White House saw the stock market rebound as their indicator that the economy was fine. And really what had happened was the economy was kind of addicted to government support. Because they gave hundreds of billions of dollars in small businesses, the stimulus checks went out, unemployment assistance went out, there was no way and to this day it continues, the government is still so attracted in the economy, that we don't know what will happen when a lot of these programs are allowed to expire. Can all these small businesses stand on their own two feet? We don't know.
Damian Paletta: (42:25)
Will the airline industry really come back, or if the Delta variant really sweeps through Europe, is that going to knock the travel industry off? I don't know. I think what we have to consider is that the hard things were not fixed. There're still millions and millions of Americans who do not have jobs because their job has disappeared. It's not like they're waiting for their employer to rehire them, the company doesn't exist anymore, or doesn't need them anymore because of automation or some other reason. And we're seeing these huge supply chain problems, the rental car industry is a total disaster, you can sell your used car now for more than you bought it for when it was new.
Damian Paletta: (43:06)
There's just these things in the economy that are broken. And the easy thing was just to give everyone money, and they had to do that. People needed to survive. But we don't know now what will happen when for example, the rental protections expire. Are they really going to kick hundreds of thousands or millions of people out of their apartments? These harder things haven't been done yet. And that's the legacy of the pandemic. And that's going to be really hard for the Biden administration to sort out.
John Darsie: (43:34)
Well, Damien and Yasmeen, it's been a pleasure to have you on again, I think you wrote in a sea of, I'm not going to say generic books and criticize the other books. But there's been a lot of political analysis of the Trump administration, while you guys certainly integrated politics into your discussion, I think it was a masterclass and just evaluating the administration's response to the pandemic, and something that's still ongoing and still affecting us today. What was their initial response and the sort of cleaning up of that process? But Anthony, do have a final word before we let Damien and Yasmeen go?
Anthony Scaramucci: (44:06)
No, I applaud the truth in your book, I'm shocked by a lot of the decisions that were born from ignorance or insecurity frankly, and I think it's a cautionary tale about the centralization of power frankly, because if you get one person in the mix, they can be destabilizing to a whole group of people that know better. And so I think that's really the lesson of the book. So, I just want to thank you, because it's a big contribution. And I know people will look back on it and say that this was very valuable to understanding what happened during one of our worst public health and safety crisis, which is still going on unfortunately.
Damian Paletta: (44:47)
Yeah. Well, that means a lot, Anthony. Thank you so much for saying that.
Anthony Scaramucci: (44:51)
It's the-
Yasmeen Abutaleb: (44:52)
Yeah, thanks for letting us come on and talk about it.
Anthony Scaramucci: (44:53)
No, we're going to sell a lot of books for you guys. You deserve it and we wish you nothing but great success with it.
Yasmeen Abutaleb: (44:58)
Thank you so much.
John Darsie: (44:59)
Well, they don't need our help, they were an instant bestseller. Again, the book is Nightmare Scenario: Inside the Trump Administration's Response to the Pandemic That Changed History. If you haven't ordered it, or haven't read it, we definitely highly recommend it.
Anthony Scaramucci: (45:13)
By the way, Yasmeen, he did ask very good questions though. It's sort of upsetting me.
Yasmeen Abutaleb: (45:18)
He did. He boasted. He boasted-
Anthony Scaramucci: (45:20)
No, he has very good question. Better stop with the firing stuff though, come November, because I'm obviously-
John Darsie: (45:29)
I didn't say firing, I just said [crosstalk 00:45:31]-
Anthony Scaramucci: (45:30)
I'm almost a senior citizen now, so I'm going to be forgetting the fact that you were bringing it up in July by the time your bonus gets set. But you should stop it at some point. I'm just letting you know.
John Darsie: (45:39)
I just said you spent a very illustrious 11 days in my opinion, it was the best 11 days of the entire-
Anthony Scaramucci: (45:45)
It was 954,000 seconds. That's what I have to tell my therapist. Okay? So, everybody relax.
John Darsie: (45:52)
All right. Well, thank you guys again, and thank you, everybody for tuning in to today's Salt Talk with Damian and Yasmeen, talking about their book. Just a reminder, if you missed any part of this talk or any of our previous Salt Talks, you can access them on our website on demand@salt.org\talks, or on our YouTube channel, which is called SaltTube. We're also on social media, Twitter is where we're most active @SaltConference, where Anthony gets a lot of his death threats, but we're also on LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook as well. I'm happy to Anthony and the entire Salt team. This is John Darsie signing off for today. We hope to see you back here again soon.
