‘Treat Me Nicely’: Trump’s Pandemic Response Was Somehow Worse Than We Thought
In the first year of the COVID pandemic, as cases spread rapidly and deaths mounted, then-President Donald Trump threatened to withdraw help for governors who didn’t treat him “nicely” and his aides barred the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from giving briefings for a staggering six months, according to a trove of new information released this week.
Emails between top officials from the CDC and Trump administration, released by a House panel on Friday, also revealed that Trump aides strong-armed the CDC into watering down its public-health guidance for churches in May 2020, just as houses of worship were emerging as particularly risky settings.
In early May, the CDC released two reports, one of which detailed how a pastor at an Arkansas church and his wife unwittingly spread the virus to 26 others, which came to balloon into a cluster of 61, of which four people died. The second report found that 87 percent of attendees at a choir practice in Washington had caught the virus.