Donald Trump and administration officials undertook deliberate efforts to undermine and discredit federal efforts to address the coronavirus pandemic, including promoting debunked information and attacking federal medical professionals and scientists, to improve Trump’s political chances, a report by a House special committee investigating the administration’s response to the pandemic states, reported by NBC News.

In the report, noted by NatZero earlier today, investigators found that when the White House hosted a group of individuals, including then-White House advisor Dr. Scott Atlas, promoting herd immunity in August, Dr. Debra Birx sent a letter to Mike Pence’s chief of staff calling them “a fringe group without grounding in epidemics, public health or on the ground common sense experience.”  Birx was so perturbed at the White House meeting with this group, she offered to go out of town so the administration would not have to explain her absence from the meeting with the fringe group. 

Birx also noted that when she joined the White House task force in March, more than two months after the first cases were found in the US, she learned that the administration had not contacted any companies capable of manufacturing vast numbers of coronavirus tests.  Two months later, Trump claimed that anyone who wanted a test could get one, even though there were test kit shortages throughout the nation.

CDC officials also testified to the committee that the White House prevented the agency from making the public recommendation to wear cloth face masks as early as April 2020.  The White House also blocked the CDC from holding public briefings for three months early in the pandemic.

In another scathing passage, the report details the actions of Dr. Scott Hatfill, a favored Trump advisor, who blocked the purchase of critical N95 facemasks because the masks were not made in the United States.  At the time, the supply of N95 facemasks had dried up, and medical professionals were being forced to wear the same mask for hours or days at a time.