COVID BREAK OUT PANDEMIC

 COVID BREAK OUT PANDEMIC

Former officials on the Covid response are also fretting over rumors that Paul Mango, who was Azar’s deputy chief of staff for policy, is working on a tell-all book about the Covid response and his role in Operation Warp Speed, the previous administration’s vaccine accelerator.

In an interview, Mango said he’s “put a lot of pen to paper” but has yet to decide whether to write a book detailing his experience in the administration.

“I don’t know exactly how I’m going to use it, but I want to make sure history has the story straight,” he said, musing that publishers would hold a bidding war for his account. “There were some real moments that were hot moments between certain individuals that would make the story a bit titillating.”

Mango swiped at some of his former colleagues, arguing that only he and Azar were entirely knowledgeable of the vaccine development effort, widely seen as a rare success story in Trump’s pandemic response. He dismissed much of the criticism of Azar as others “trying to protect their own reputations.”

“I’ve never seen such underhanded, unethical, unprofessional behavior as I saw in the federal government,” he said. “[Azar] wasn’t dealt a hand of aces, and you have to deal with what you have.”

Other former Trump health officials described being inundated with interview requests over the last couple months, including for books in the works by two separate groups of Washington Post reporters seeking to reconstruct the events of the past year.

Scott Gottlieb, Trump’s first FDA, commissioner who remained in close contact with administration officials during the Covid response, is also due out with a book in July. And Andy Slavitt, now a senior adviser to Biden’s Covid response team, has also penned a pandemic book that will publish in June.

Slavitt said his recounting — which is labeled as the “inside story of how leadership failures, politics, and selfishness doomed the U.S. coronavirus response” — is built off interviews with Azar and others involved in the response, as well as his own interactions with Birx, former White House senior adviser Jared Kushner and a half-dozen others.

“I got broad cooperation,” he said.

For many former Trump health officials, the upcoming CNN special will mark their first extensive public comments about their time in the administration since leaving government.

Only Birx has done other on-camera interviews, during which she said she constantly thought of quitting her White House job and had to contend in private with “outside advisers” who presented Trump with contradictory data on the pandemic.

Check-ins among the small group of former Trump officials have dropped off in recent weeks, Hahn said, but the principle underpinning of the group remains.

“If one person was attacked, we were all attacked, and we were going to stand behind each other,” he said of the pact they struck during the height of the pandemic response. “I wanted to make sure people understood that, and that was really the pointy edge of the stick for me.”