ENJOY
Analysis
The Biden campaign’s false claim a top
CDC official was ‘silenced’
By
March 24, 2020 at 3:00 a.m. EDT
“All the while, anyone who raised an alarm
about this — a red flag — was silenced. Look no further than Dr. Nancy
Messonnier, a career official at the Centers for Disease Control who was the
first to raise the alarm. … Starting the next day, Dr. Messonnier no longer
appeared at public briefings of the White House coronavirus task
force. The president and the White House sent a clear message to scientists in
the government — there would be a price for speaking out and speaking up.”
— Ron Klain, Biden campaign adviser and former
Ebola “czar,” in a video released March 21
Former vice president Joe Biden tweeted
an informational video on the novel coronavirus that featured Ron Klain, a
longtime Biden aide who served as President Barack Obama’s top official
overseeing the administration’s response to the Ebola outbreak in 2014. The video
was a viral hit — it got more than 4 million views — and it mixed attacks on
Trump’s handling of the public health crisis with a pitch for Biden’s
proposals.
But Klain’s framing of the Messonnier situation is simply wrong.
Four Pinocchios
The Facts
Messonnier is the director of the National
Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases. On Feb. 25, Messonnier, who
is based at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s headquarters in
Atlanta, gave a telephone briefing — not on camera — to reporters on the coronavirus
outbreak. “It’s not so much a question of if this will happen anymore but
rather more a question of exactly when this will happen and how many people in
this country will have severe illness,” she said in a clip that Klain says was
the “first to raise the alarm.”
One section of Messonnier’s remarks was
especially stark.
“I had a conversation with my family over
breakfast this morning, and I told my children that while I didn’t think that
they were at risk right now, we as a family need to be preparing for
significant disruption of our lives,” Messonnier said. “You should ask your
children’s school about their plans for school dismissals or school closures.
Ask if there are plans for teleschool. I contacted my local school
superintendent this morning with exactly those questions.”
Messonnier’s blunt phrasing affected Wall
Street. The Dow Jones industrial average slid nearly 900 points, the second day
in a row coronavirus worries impacted the market. Some White House aides
responded by offering more optimism. White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow,
speaking on CNBC, said: “We have contained this. I won’t say airtight, but
pretty close to airtight.”
At the time, more than a month after the first
case had been identified in the United States, only 426 people had been tested because
of a problem with CDC test kits, far fewer than in other industrialized
nations. On Feb. 25, there were 57 documented cases of covid-19 in the
United States. (As of March 23, about four weeks later, there are more than
46,000 cases in the United States.)
Various news reports indicate that President
Trump, who was returning from a trip to India, was upset about the impact her
remarks had on the markets. During his trip, the president claimed the outbreak
was “very well under control.”
The New York Times reported:
“The president immediately got on the phone
with Alex M. Azar II, his secretary of health and human services. That call
scared people, he shouted, referring to Dr. Messonnier’s warnings. Are we at
the point that we will have to start closing schools? the president added,
alarmed, according to an official who heard about the call.”
The Washington Post reported:
“On Feb. 25, Nancy Messonnier, a senior CDC
official, sounded perhaps the most significant public alarm to that point, when
she told reporters that the coronavirus was likely to spread within communities
in the United States and that disruptions to daily life could be ‘severe.’
Trump called Azar on his way back from a trip to India and complained that
Messonnier was scaring the stock markets, according to two senior
administration officials.”
In the Biden video, Klain claims there was
immediate blowback: “Starting the next day, Dr. Messonnier no longer appeared
at public briefings of the White House coronavirus task force. The president
and the White House sent a clear message to scientists in the government —
there would be a price for speaking out and speaking up.” The video imposes question
marks over the heads of the people appearing onstage with Trump on Feb. 26.
But if you look closely, you will see there is
a woman standing next to Trump. Who’s that? Anne Schuchat, the CDC’s principal
deputy director — and Messonnier’s superior.
Indeed, just a day before, Schuchat had
participated in a televised news conference of
the coronavirus task force, where her message was similar to what Messonnier
said, if not quite as stark: “It’s not so much a question of if this will
happen anymore, but rather more a question of exactly when this will happen,
and how many people in this country will become infected? And how many of those
will develop severe or more complicated disease?”
At the Feb. 26 news conference, Trump
announced that Vice President Pence was taking charge of the task force.
(Previously, Azar had run it.) From then on, briefings were held at the White
House, not the Department of Health and Human Services. Trump headlines each
one. One would presume either the director or deputy director would be onstage
with the president, not a lower-ranking official.
Meanwhile, far from being silenced, Messonnier
kept doing her telephone briefings with reporters — on Feb. 28, Feb. 29, March 3 and March 9. She also
appeared in four videos shared on social media, such as this one from March 14.
CDC
Briefing Room: Dr. Nancy Messonnier gives an update on #COVID19. For more info
visit http://cdc.gov/COVID19 .
“It’s fair to say that
as the trajectory of the outbreak continues, many people in the United States
will at some point in time, either this year or next, be exposed to this virus,
and there’s a good chance many will become sick,” Messonnier warned on March 9.
Before Feb. 25, Messonnier had appeared in 13
telebriefings over six weeks, often issuing warnings. “The goal of the measures
we have taken to date are to slow the introduction and impact of this disease
in the United States but at some point, we are likely to see community spread
in the U.S.,” she said on Feb. 12. “This
will require the effort of all levels of government, the public health system
and our communities as we face these challenges together.”
The Washington Post reported on March 19 that
the CDC’s public voice has been sidelined in recent weeks, in part because the
White House briefings kept conflicting with plans for CDC briefings. CDC
Director Robert Redfield and “Schuchat have testified before Congress and
briefed members in closed sessions,” The Post said. “But top CDC officials have
rarely appeared on camera or been quoted in media interviews in recent weeks.”
The article said Redfield participates in task force meetings, splitting his
time between Atlanta and Washington.
The Biden campaign defended Klain’s comments
in the video. A campaign official said it was accurate to say she “no longer
appeared at public briefings of the White House coronavirus task force” because
she had been with Azar, along with Redfield, at a media briefing on Jan. 28.
That was one day before the task force was formed on Jan. 29.
So that was a one-off event, held long before
the Feb. 25 call that spooked the markets.
The campaign also pointed to a quote from
Thomas R. Frieden, a former CDC director, about Messonnier being “silenced”
in a New York Times article about
Anthony S. Fauci of the National Institutes of Health.
“Donald Trump neglected and lied about the
coronavirus outbreak time and time again, disregarding warnings from his own
medical and intelligence experts and downplaying the threat to the public. He
was outraged that Dr. Messonnier didn’t follow his example and instead told the
American people the truth,” said Biden campaign spokesman Andrew Bates. “And
after this incident she appeared in no more briefings with Sec. Azar, a core
member of the White House task force. Our assertion about her treatment is
backed up by the statement of the former head of the CDC, who said, ‘Nancy
Messonnier told it like it is. And she was 100 percent right, and they silenced
the messenger.’”
The CDC did not respond to a request for comment.
The Pinocchio Test
Messonnier’s remarks on Feb. 25 may have
caught the attention of Wall Street and caused angst in the White House. But we cannot find evidence of her being
immediately silenced, as Klain claims in the video.
Messonnier
continued to hold her regular telephone briefings with reporters for another
two weeks. The task force
briefings moved to the White House after Pence was named to head the task
force, but Messonnier was not a regular participant and she appears not to have
been senior enough to share the stage with the president. And although the
CDC’s voice has been muted in recent weeks, that development does not appear
related to her Feb. 25 comments.
We concede that news reports indicate Trump
was upset by her remarks — and that there are signs he is tired of warnings from
scientists and doctors as the economy implodes. He has
certainly lashed out at people who have disagreed with him or given him
information that conflicted with his point of view. We’ve documented Trump’s many false or
misleading claims about the coronavirus outbreak.
But
that’s no excuse for this video to claim Messonnier was silenced when, in fact,
she kept briefing reporters. Klain would have been on more solid ground to
refer to the reporting that Messonnier’s message annoyed Trump. But instead, the video created a false narrative. The Biden
campaign earns Four Pinocchios.
Four Pinocchios
