Coronavirus Whistleblower Details Inexcusable and Egregious Trump Administration Incompetence in Initial Response. Trumpster Bureaucrat Is Punishing Whistleblower.
February 27, 2020
Donald Trump is putting his corrupt political re-election goals above protecting the US public. (Gage Skidmore)
By Laura Clawson
The Trump administration has another whistleblower, only this one isn’t about Ukraine and political corruption: It’s about coronavirus and life-threatening levels of incompetence.
According to the whistleblower, who is a senior official in the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), more than a dozen workers were “improperly deployed” and “not properly trained or equipped to operate in a public health emergency situation” when they received Americans evacuated from Wuhan, China, the first center of the coronavirus outbreak. The workers didn’t wear protective gear as they met face-to-face with the evacuees, The Washington Post reports after viewing a redacted copy of the whistleblower’s complaint.
It wasn’t just in the moment the workers were in contact with the Americans returned from Wuhan, as “appropriate steps were not taken to quarantine, monitor, or test [the workers] during their deployment and upon their return home,” the whistleblower complaint alleges. Around 27 employees of the Administration for Children and Families, part of HHS, were potentially exposed at two different sites.
After their deployments in late January and early February, “the workers returned to their normal duties, some taking commercial airline flights to return to their offices around the country, the lawyers said.”
The whistleblower says she has faced retaliation for reporting her concerns and, despite an exemplary career including two awards just last year, has been reassigned to a new job and told she will be terminated if she doesn’t accept the new assignment by March 5.
Update: According to Chris Hayes,
So here's what appears to be chain of events: The Trump administration repatriated infected Americans over the objections of the CDC. HHS then sent federal workers to interact with the infected population without adequate training or protection
Then those workers went out into the public with no monitoring or testing regime in place. And now the first [official] US-contracted case has appeared right near one of the Airforce bases where this all [this was centered].
When someone at HHS raised alarms about all this she was criticized for hurting morale and then ordered to another position or be fired.
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