
Former Covid testing czar dishes on the politics that interrupted the early pandemic response
In the early, turbulent days of the Trump White House’s response to the pandemic, there were few people who circled in the same orbit as all of the top health leaders, and Admiral Brett Giroir, the first coronavirus testing czar from March 2020, who also served briefly as acting FDA commissioner in Nov. 2019, was one of them.
In his new memoir, to be published next Tuesday by Texas A&M, Giroir explains what went down behind some of the most politically-charged scenes, with two political appointees — the economist Peter Navarro, who rallied for the use of hydroxychloroquine even after the randomized controlled trials failed, and Scott Atlas, Trump’s only political appointee to be added to the federal coronavirus task force — both of whom featured prominently in some of the more contentious meetings.
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