You can read CNN's take on its own report here.
Actually, you might want to start there and then circle back here. I'll wait.
Ok. Glad you're back.
The NYTimes has some reporting on the report:
In interviews broadcast on CNN Sunday night, former President Donald J. Trump’s pandemic officials confirmed in stark and no uncertain terms what was already an open secret in Washington: The administration’s pandemic response was riddled with dysfunction, and the discord, untruths and infighting most likely cost many lives.
Dr. Deborah L. Birx, Mr. Trump’s coronavirus response coordinator, suggested that hundreds of thousands of Americans may have died needlessly, and Adm. Brett P. Giroir, the testing czar, said the administration had lied to the public about the availability of testing.
The comments were among a string of bombshells that emerged during a CNN special report that featured the doctors who led the government’s coronavirus response in 2020.
A dysfunctional Trump response to the crisis? One marked by discord? Untruths? That needlessly cost many many lives?
You don't say!
On all that death:
But it was Dr. Birx, who has been pilloried for praising Mr. Trump as being “so attentive to the scientific literature” and for not publicly correcting the president as he made outlandish claims about unproven therapies, whose disclosures may have been the most compelling.
As of Sunday, more than 548,000 Americans have died from infection with the coronavirus. “I look at it this way,” she said. “The first time, we have an excuse. There were about 100,000 deaths that came from that original surge.”
“All of the rest of them,” she said, referring to almost 450,000 deaths, “in my mind, could have been mitigated or decreased substantially” had the administration acted more aggressively.
But then again, Trump didn't want the crisis to make him look bad, you know:
Several of the officials, including Dr. Anthony S. Fauci — who unlike the others is a career scientist and is now advising President Biden — blamed China, where the virus was first detected, for not being open enough with the United States. And several, including Dr. Redfield and Admiral Giroir, said early stumbles with testing — and the attitude within the White House that testing made the president look bad by driving up the number of case reports — were a serious problem in the administration’s response.
And the problems with testing went beyond simply Mr. Trump’s obsession with optics. Admiral Giroir said that the administration simply did not have as many tests as top officials claimed at the time.
“When we said there were millions of tests — there weren’t, right?” he said. “There were components of the test available but not the full deal.”
And so they lied.
The Washington Post has some reporting, too:
Some of the Trump administration’s most senior public health officials offered a blistering post-mortem of the former president’s response to the pandemic in a documentary that aired on CNN on Sunday night. The former and current officials described a federal government in such disarray that hundreds of thousands of people may have needlessly died as a result.
Much of the administration’s dysfunction played out in the open, but the insider accounts provided additional confirmation of the chaos and underscored the devastating effects the political polarization had on public health measures. Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator under President Donald Trump, said in an interview for the documentary that most coronavirus deaths in the United States could have been prevented if the administration had acted earlier and more decisively.
