Alex Azar Anonymous’: Trump health officials start a club to counter former HHS chief

'Alex Azar Anonymous’: Trump health officials start a club to counter former HHS chief

Leaders of Trump’s Covid response are aligning their stories, worried that Azar will try to pin the blame on them in upcoming books.

Much of the group had fraught relationships with then-Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, whose own accounts of the administration’s pandemic efforts have often diverged from theirs. | Jacquelyn Martin-Pool/Getty Images

By ADAM CANCRYN

03/25/2021 08:05 PM EDT

A small group of top Trump health officials recently held a series of discussions to coordinate their accounts of the administration’s troubled Covid-19 response, worried they will be scapegoated by old colleagues — including their onetime boss, former Health secretary Alex Azar, according to six people with knowledge of their interactions.

Much of the group — which includes former FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn, former CDC Director Robert Redfield, former Medicare chief Seema Verma and former White House Covid coordinator Deborah Birx — had fraught relationships with Azar, whose own accounts of the administration’s pandemic efforts have often diverged from theirs.

Azar feuded openly with Hahn and Redfield during the pandemic, and he fought with Verma throughout his tenure atop the health department. And as book writers, documentarians and former administration officials race to chronicle the cutthroat Trump era, they’re mounting a new effort to defend themselves.