On November 2, the eve of Election Day, the Washington Post reported on an “internal memo” I’d written. The article, headlined “Top Trump Advisor Bluntly Contradicts President on Covid-19 Threat, Urging All-Out Response,” led with a line about my sounding the alarm: “We are entering the most concerning and most deadly phase of this pandemic.”
At first, I wasn’t greatly concerned about having my words cited in a story by writers with whom I hadn’t spoken—mostly, because what they’d quoted was accurate. I learned of the story while I was in Denver, on the last stop of a multi-week driving tour of the Upper Midwest and Intermountain West. I’d been using similar language when letting governors and health officials know exactly what our future held and how each of them needed to prepare for it.
I had also written those exact words for the last couple of weeks in the daily report I routinely sent out before 6:30 a.m. I had never shared these reports with anyone not on the distribution list, which had remained essentially the same for the prior 220 such reports I’d prepared since coming to the White House. I had never leaked any of the reports to the press, and to the best of my knowledge, no one else had, either.
My words were not unique, of course. I had used similar language many, many times before in the previous month, when I’d seen firsthand the emergent crisis in the Northern Plains and Rocky Mountain states. So, their meaning wasn’t news to me, nor would it be to anyone on the task force or who had received these daily reports. I’d made the same point clear, using the same language, in previous daily reports and in personal conversations with senior White House leadership—in particular, with Short, Meadows, and Kushner.
I was dismayed that the writers of the Post piece had chosen to point out only the alarm bells I was sounding and had not included the strong solutions and recommendations I’d made. I understood that bad news and sensational headlines gets more eyeballs. If only the reporters had gone a step further and clearly laid out that my words were not a denunciation of the administration, but a call to action. We had to immediately shift attention away from the voting booth and the ballot box and back to what was happening in our own homes. This was what our postelection strategy was all about—getting the White House fully engaged, so that we could be that critical voice prompting Americans to prevent the fall and winter surge from becoming as horrific as it turned out to be.
I had again produced a balanced plan that would save lives while keeping businesses and schools safely open. Having key aspects of it made known to the public could have been the kickoff the new campaign needed. As I’d also written, after reiterating the need for mitigation measures, “This is about empowering Americans with the knowledge and data for decision making to prevent community spread and save lives.” Of course, none of this made it into the Post.
After a day of meetings in Denver with the governor and his staff and the mayor and his staff, Irum and I needed to head to the airport very early the next morning to fly back to DC on Election Day. I was still packing late Monday night when my White House phone rang. It was Marc Short.
“You’ve seen what the Post put out.” His tone was clipped. It sounded as if he were biting off the top of each of those t’s.
“I have.”
“Why did you do that? You had to know how damaging this is.”
“You know I’m the only one that doesn’t leak. Ask anyone in the Press Corps.”
He wouldn’t let it go.
I tried logic, explaining that if the Post piece was damaging to the president and the administration, it was also damaging to my ability to move forward with the new strategic plan. “We have a new strategy you’ve all agreed to. I’ve been effective in working with the governors. Now we can do the same things nationally. Why would you think I’d blow all that up now?”
“People do surprising things all the time,” Short said. “They don’t think things through. They let their emotions get to them. It doesn’t matter why.”
It was late; Marc had vented his frustration. We’d pick up the matter later.
On the flight, Marc’s comments about people letting their emotions get to them finally hit me. My reaction to his remark was delayed because I’d heard such things so many times before. Plus, I had needed to focus on refuting his allegation. If a man made a decision to leak information, it would be seen as “calculating,” a product of internal logical debate, not emotion. Not so with a woman. And yet, if I didn’t get bent out of shape, scream and cry and respond emotionally to what I was being falsely accused of, I would be seen as a cold bitch. That I handled the matter professionally and reasonably would be counted against me. I’d faced this no-win situation so many times, as had so many other women, that I had to let it go, just let it stream behind me like a jet’s contrail.
Instead, I thought about something Marc Short wasn’t aware of. On Sunday, Novemer 1, David Kessler from the Biden team had texted me, asking if I had any information that I could share about a vaccine announcement. He was worried about an Election Day vaccine development surprise, and he did ask if I had any information on that front that I could share. I told him I didn’t. As the rest of the country knew by then, no vaccine surprise would be sprung before Election Day. The voters who had yet to cast their ballots or make up their minds had to do so with the vaccines’ date of approval still an unknown. While some might have lost sleep over this, I wondered instead whether the vaccines’ arrival would be accompanied by an appropriate level of understanding among Americans about what vaccines could and couldn’t do for their immune defense.
After I’d gotten Marc’s call, I hadn’t slept—not because of what his language had implied, but because I was worried what this recent dustup would mean for the postelection Covid-19 communication campaign I had worked on with the task force doctors. While out on the road, I had remained in contact with Tony daily, and with Bob and Steve multiple times each week. I believed this was the moment we could unify the administration into a single consistent voice to combat the surge I could see building.
The leak to the Post had been meant to damage my standing in the White House; I was sure of it. But going to this length to criticize the administration’s record on the pandemic response on the eve of the election felt redundant: many people had already voted. I wondered if it was not the president, but me the leaker was going after. Maybe the leaker was someone protecting their turf, someone fearful of dismissal. Maybe it was someone hoping to be elevated in status, who wanted to edge me out. Maybe it was someone like Scott Atlas, who’d lost status after his Russian television embarrassment and wanted to see the same happen to me. I didn’t know who did it then, and I still don’t know. In that environment, nearly everyone was a suspect.
One of my hesitations in coming to the White House in the first place had been President Trump’s history of attacks on others, which had produced a culture of retaliation. While still in Africa and elsewhere during the early years of his administration, I was aware that policy disputes in the White House often resulted in those on the losing side going to the press. If you felt wronged, or were on the wrong side of the debate on a given issue, you leaked to the Associated Press. If you were aggrieved, you might leak, for example, an internal memo about the possibility of the administration’s deploying a hundred thousand National Guard troops to assist in rounding up undocumented migrants; or a draft of an executive order about a plan to reopen CIA black site prisons for the interrogation of terrorism suspects. If you had a problem with Stephen Miller, you might leak nine hundred of the senior advisor’s emails about his views on immigration and minorities.
Because I was an outsider and had an aversion to (and no record of) going to the press with information, I was kept (and liked being) very much out of the loop. Even before my arrival in Washington as response coordinator, I had been so aware of how information might leak that I didn’t discuss the possibility of my coming to the White House with my own husband or family members. In task force meetings, I was so concerned about leaks that when we devised our plan for the additional thirty days to Slow the Spread, I did not fully disclose the details among the task force members, for fear that someone—most notably, Marc Short or Mark Meadows—might leak it in advance of my meeting with the president to help ensure that President Trump wouldn’t follow my recommendations. This was the level of suspicion and distrust that ran through every action at the White House.
But if the leaker cared about warning Americans, why hadn’t they leaked my words weeks ago, before the Northern Plains and Rocky Mountain states were in full community spread? This leak wasn’t about raising the alarm.
Why now? Who was the target?
Tyler Ann shared with me a rumor that was circulating suggesting that if Trump won a second term, he’d appoint me to a cabinet position in his administration. I had to laugh about anyone taking that rumor seriously, and I dismissed it just as I’d dismissed so many other rumors, about me and others, circulating through the West Wing. Because others were playing a political power game, they might have assumed that I was, too. Everyone seemed to view my actions and motivations through their own lens, projecting their own ambitions onto me. This was not a White House that understood the nature or importance of public service for its own sake. This administration wasn’t used to working with people who had no political ambitions or who lacked that “killer” business instinct. Service without ulterior motives was a foreign concept to them.
I may have been a political appointee to President Obama and President Trump, but for forty years I had served my country. I had already decided to retire from federal service in the spring of 2021; consequently, I had no interest in a cabinet position then or now. I’d kept my cards close to my vest throughout my career, but I’d also made it clear that I didn’t have that kind of ambition, or any desire, to advance to that level.
Of course, shifting from public service to the private sector was anxiety inducing. Career change is always stressful for anyone. I was committed to bringing integrated big data analysis for decision making and high-impact solutions to scale to the underserved in America, including the tribal nations. I wanted to engage the private sector to improve the country’s pandemic response and translate what I had seen and learned into actions to improve our readiness. Although I didn’t know what opportunities there were, after the last months in the White House, I was excited about the unique and essential role the private sector had played (and would continue to play) in our response to Covid-19. I believed then (and still do now) that the private sector needs to play a key role in pandemic preparedness, and I knew I could do something there. That was my personal future; in the meantime, I had the future of this pandemic response to return to.
Back in DC on Election Day, I had my doubts about an outcome in the president’s favor. During our visits to forty-four of the fifty U.S. states, Irum and I had heard the people speak. We were certain that the president and his team had underestimated the level of discontent and distrust his rhetoric about the pandemic had produced. I could see it in the eyes of every woman who worried about her elderly parents or her own young children. I knew the same fear and concern. People may have been going to the rallies and acting like they would still vote Republican, but I suspected that many would express their pandemic fears at the ballot box. The twenty- to thirty-somethings, Generations Y and Z, had accepted the scientific basis for the sacrifices we had asked them to make and had made it clear that the pandemic was the major issue of the day. And they weren’t happy with the federal response to it. Most weren’t voting for President Trump.
AFTER LOBBYING HARD THROUGHOUT the West Wing for most of October for the fall and winter strategy, I felt I had been persuasive enough and I fully expected that, the day after the election, regardless of its outcome, we’d be able to hit the ground running with it. We’d received a green light from the administration. Now, preparing the American people for the dangerous weeks and months ahead could begin. I could not have been more wrong.
I reported for work the day after the election. Despite the plan to improve communications and actions, I could do neither that day. Instead, I walked into a scene right out of a postapocalyptic thriller. The West Wing offices were nearly empty. That day, I got more voice mail greetings than had actual conversations. It was difficult to get responses from senior leaders, and no one was available for meetings that first day. I initially chalked it up to a long night watching the election results.
With the vote tallying not yet complete, I expected a certain level of preoccupation by the administration—but preoccupation with the election continued not just the day after the election, but for the remainder of my term in the White House.
During that first week back, I assumed that concern over and attention to the pandemic would be restored to March and April levels. I continued to send out the daily reports, pointing out that fifteen states were in the red zone and a further eight had verged on that worst category. This was even before Thanksgiving, when people would be taking public transport and gathering together in homes across America, risking further exposure and spread. Unless we made the moves our new strategy called for, the disaster I’d characterized wouldn’t remain possible, but would become probable.
Unfortunately, the leak to the Washington Post, combined with the distractions of the election, continued to do damage to my plans. Instead of concentrating time and energy on effectively testing to find silent spread, the administration was concerned about how the election truth was being spread. On November 5, I took the narrow steps up from my office area on the first floor of the West Wing to the second floor, where the most senior advisors, the vice president, and the Oval Office were, hoping to find Marc Short. I wanted to ask for a ten-minute press briefing to deliver the message that we needed an aggressive response to the approaching winter and holiday gatherings.
Before I could get to Marc Short, I spotted Mark Meadows.
“Mark,” I said, “you don’t think that I gave the report to the Post. I mean, that’s just—”
He looked up from the document he was reading. “What I think doesn’t matter. It’s what you made people think that does. You saw the exit polls. You’ve seen what’s going on in the critical races. You think that your words didn’t matter? They did. Big time.” He edged to the side to move past me.
“You can’t pin all of that on me.”
“No?” He turned back to face me. “You can believe what you want, but you need to know this: your reputation is toast. What you did or didn’t do isn’t going to change that.”
What struck me most was how so matter-of-fact he was about it. You did it. We know it. No one believes you or what you have to say anymore.
He went on to say that given the report’s large distribution list, and the provocative language I’d used, it was inevitable that it would leak.
Of course, it was. That was how this White House operated.
I reminded him that I’d been voicing the same level of concern in the same unambiguous language for the past four weeks, and my words were never leaked before. If he had concerns about what I was saying or how I was stating it, he could have raised the issue with me earlier. What I didn’t say, but thought, was: This reaction to the leak is evidence of the very problem to which I have been giving voice from the beginning. Prior to this, Meadows and others hadn’t really paid attention to my daily reports. Only after one of them was leaked were he and others roused from their campaign fixation. My tone, which they now objected to, had been consistent for quite a while. Indeed, from day one—in my daily reports, in my communications with everyone. I had been direct. I told them when things were better. I told them when things were worse. I told them when things were going to get much worse. From the moment I set foot in the White House, I spoke and wrote the truth.
Yet, instead of focusing on the harsh reality my words revealed, instead of understanding what this reality meant for the lives and safety of Americans, the administration was preoccupied with finding whoever had leaked the truth. It didn’t matter that these awful things were happening—that people were dying in the hundreds of thousands. What mattered was that now the public knew it was happening. To this White House, solving the problem simply meant finding the leaker. And they believed it was me. More important, they couldn’t believe that I would state starkly and clearly that the United States was in an ongoing and worsening crisis. The last week of October, the Friday before the leak, we saw nearly 100,000 new cases nationwide in a single day. By the beginning of November, even before we’d entered the full winter surge, 220,000 Americans had died. We still had time to act aggressively.
That they’d censored the governor’s reports, that they now objected to my tone and language, was another example of the collective desire to alter the data to fit a predetermined picture of how the response was going, how it should be handled. All this to support the series of fairy tales they told themselves at night. Engaged in magical thinking, they’d insisted that This time will be different. They weren’t alone in this misguided belief. Prior to each surge, every governor and mayor had said the same thing: This time will be different because of X or because of Y. But this virus didn’t care about fairy tales or X or Y. It mindlessly did one thing: replicate. And people’s behavior allowed it to do so. We had to stay in a constant state of vigilance about the SARS-CoV-2 virus until we had the vaccine and could immunize those at the greatest risk for severe disease. It could mutate, transforming into an even more infectious variant. We had tools, solutions, and the capacity to change the course of this pandemic, but the virus wouldn’t go away miraculously. It wouldn’t just “disappear.” Hot weather would not, in fact, have a negative effect on it; hot weather drove people indoors. Disinfectants were not a treatment. Hydroxychloroquine had not been shown effective against the virus in clinical trials.
The White House economists were worried about the economy. But death by economic devastation would not exceed death by Covid-19. In June, there were no signs that the pandemic was “dying out” or “going to fade away.” In early July, the pandemic wasn’t getting under control. Ninety-nine percent of Covid-19 cases weren’t “harmless.” In fact, 8 to 10 percent of Covid-19 cases resulted in death in those over seventy. Seventy-five percent of the deaths were in those over sixty-five. In late 2021, it was reported that 1 in 100 Americans over sixty-five had succumbed to Covid-19, and life expectancy had dropped by two years in specific racial and ethnic groups. We didn’t have “the lowest mortality rate in the world.” We weren’t “rounding the turn” or in the final stretch. This was the case in late 2020 and was still true in late 2021.
Tony, Bob, Steve, Jerome, and I were in agreement. We’d seen how effective mitigation approaches were. When they weren’t in place, cases rose, hospitals became stressed, and people died in greater numbers. The leak had put yet another nail in the pandemic response coffin. The chief White House officials and the president turned their backs on me and on measures they themselves had agreed to implement. I quickly realized that, as time went on, and so many senior White House people became focused on overturning the election results, the critical postelection pandemic-control initiatives we’d hoped to enact were also likely to be discredited. Maybe this had been the leaker’s goal: Damage the messenger, damage the message.
I pressed on, letting everyone know that I would limit the number of recipients of the daily report. It still went to all the most essential people—it absolutely had to—but I limited the number of lower-level personnel receiving it. I couldn’t afford another leak. I figured that making this gesture would ease some of the pressure on me. I also wrote to all the doctors on the task force and asked them not to have their staff read their emails or forward content widely. Still, I continued stating in the report that the situation had worsened, that the window on having a significant impact on the virus was rapidly closing.
While it hardly mattered to most White House senior advisors, two important pieces of science came in during the first week of November that substantiated the plan we had developed. The first was the Japanese study showing that masks did provide bidirectional protection, protecting both the wearer and those around them. This contradicted what had been the CDC’s official position since April of only protecting others, not the wearer. The second was an article published in the International Journal of Infectious Diseases, titled “Asymptomatic SARS Coronavirus 2 Infection: Invisible Yet Invincible.” I didn’t agree with the “invincible” part, but I did agree with the study’s conclusion that “Asymptomatic individuals carrying SARS-CoV-2 are hidden drivers of the pandemic” and that “a second wave was expected.”
I like to imagine how my cause could have been helped if this research had landed on my desk before the leak to the Washington Post. Ultimately, I don’t think it would have mattered; minds had been made up, and then closed, for so long. Even though I shared the results of these studies, it didn’t make any difference. Our new national communication plan would not be implemented. The president wasn’t going to resume the modified press briefings I’d asked for. (I had suggested that President Trump make introductory remarks, so that he’d get his moment, and that the vice president then take over.) Task force meetings weren’t going to significantly increase in frequency. The White House would not endorse the new silent spread testing plan. The White House would not return to the level of focus and energy we’d seen in March and April to face a crisis that had become much deeper than it had been in those early months. None of this was going to happen. And it didn’t.
My time at the White House was coming to a close. This outsider would soon be lumped in with all the Trump insiders. I had known that going into the White House would be a terminal event for my long federal career, but that didn’t make the stark reality of my current situation any easier. Some of my long-term PEPFAR colleagues were sure to conflate their feelings about President Trump with their feeling about me. Still, I hadn’t given a thought to quitting since my meeting with President Bush. I’d stuck with it this far, and too much was still at stake. As so many others in this administration had done, I had to direct my considerable concerns and frustrations into action, not recrimination. I wouldn’t let myself sink to the level of putting my own interests before those of the rest of the country, as some in the administration had done. Aggrieved over the election results, some in the West Wing appeared willing to engage in a dereliction of duty. I wasn’t about to let my personal grievances further weaken our response to the approaching surge. Jared and the vice president remained my go-tos; we continued to make progress behind the scenes.
If I found consolation in anything in this period, it was that with the West Wing’s emphasis on overturning the election results, no one seemed to believe it worth the effort to stop me from doing anything I’d done before. I still wasn’t able to do national media, but whenever I put in requests to meet with local press in hot spots, I met no resistance. As long as I didn’t show up on any of the four presidential TV screens, I was free to talk to whomever I wanted and, essentially, to say what I wanted. The White House Comms team continued to facilitate these local press hits. The Huddle team continued to help me align supplies and therapeutics with need, and the Intergovernmental Affairs team continued to facilitate my calls and visits with governors and mayors across the country. My work was actively supported at one level and completely shut down at another—all within the same West Wing. If, in my dealings with some of the senior White House people, the message I was getting was Talk to the hand, at least I was still able to reach out to the American people.
Just as going on the road had gotten me in better touch than from a distance, now, from the studio in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, I was getting in touch remotely. Along with talking about the guidance and safe approaches to holiday gatherings, I spoke to people about what I’d seen on the ground in communities very much like theirs. I got it. People were tired. They were frustrated. They were nearing the end of a long year and hoping that it could end as it had in the past, with a celebration among family and friends.
On one of these local news hits, I shared a story of meeting an intensivist at one of the two main hospitals in Billings, Montana, a city of more than a hundred thousand people. At first, this critical care physician was responsible for twenty-four Covid-19 patients in the hospital’s now-full ICU. Then the administration set up an additional eight ICU beds around the hospital, and she became solely responsible for those patients, too. One doctor and a small team of nurses had to take care of thirty-two critically ill people scattered across a hospital. The intensivist spent every day running from one end of the building to the other, just to ensure an optimal level of care for every one of her patients. Day after day, she was finding a way or making one.
This was the image I wanted to implant in people’s minds. Just as the image of that overrun hospital in Wuhan had galvanized me and contributed to my returning to the United States, I wanted this image to galvanize the American people. Months after my visit to Billings, our frontline health care workers were still in the trenches, still doing everything they could to save lives.
Because of the high regard so many people had for health care workers, and because I believed in the power of personal stories to get people’s attention and spur them to action, I contacted various hospitals around the country, asking administrators to enlist the aid of their health care staff to do media spots. With the holidays approaching, these doctors and nurses were in the best position—certainly in a better position than any statement the CDC or the White House could put out—to explain how early mild cases resulted in hospitalizations a few weeks later as the virus was transmitted to vulnerable and aged family members. These health care workers could share the stories of patients who were hospitalized now because they had gotten infected at a gathering of friends or family and help advance the message—at times and in ways that were more impactful than anything I or their states’ governors could do. My hope was that, as members of their local community, they would instill trust in the neighbors who heard their stories on the local news, perhaps offsetting some of the damage done by the administration’s silence.
WHEREAS THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION heard only one clock ticking down to what would be an eventual defeat, I heard multiple clocks, and wanted to be as effective as possible with the time I had left. I wanted the new administration to enter into power with the winter surge in decline, not one still in full exponential growth. One way to communicate this sense of urgency would be to get back out to the states that were in the gravest danger, but continuing to push for our national strategy was the greater priority. I knew that December would be the earliest I could get back on the road. With that settled, I focused on several other priorities—the first of which was to meet with the vice president to warn him that this fall surge was the biggest crisis we had faced and that we were not moving fast enough. Vice President Pence and Jared had the most direct access to the president, and the vice president had a track record of listening to me and trusting me.
I planned to tell him that we needed to resume regular task force meetings. If not every day, then at the very least three to four times a week. Also, the president needed to address the nation at a press briefing, as he had done so frequently in the spring, at the height of that surge. The vice president had to tell the president what was becoming abundantly clear: that behavioral change in the form of wearing masks indoors in public spaces and limiting the size of family gatherings, approaching the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday and then Christmas with the utmost caution, was critical to slowing the spread and keeping your family healthy. The risk was no longer so great in public places; the most dangerous infection zones were in our own homes.
Normally, to get to the vice president, I went through Marc Short—as I’d been trying to do since I returned to DC on November 3. But Marc hadn’t responded for a week. I’d expected to have the opportunity to hold press briefings after the election, to convey the seriousness of the crisis we were facing.
Instead, on November 5, the president held a White House press conference claiming voter fraud. A day later, he tweeted that the lawsuits were just beginning. I couldn’t get through to anyone about enacting our new communications strategy because they were busy filing lawsuits to halt the vote counting in Michigan and Georgia and requesting a recount in Wisconsin. This pattern of inattention continued throughout the week. Accusations of fraud, a refusal to concede, multiple legal challenges—all took precedence over the response to the pandemic and proactive messaging to lessen the effects of the fall surge.
While the Trump administration waited for recounts, the body count was rising. Between November 3 and 10, nearly nine thousand additional Americans died of Covid-19. On November 10, I abandoned the established protocol of requesting time with the vice president through his chief of staff. Instead, I contacted Zach Bauer, the vice president’s “body man,” the aide with the most direct contact to him, telling him I was desperate; the situation was dire. I needed just a few minutes of the vice president’s time. Pressing for a televised task force briefing, I wrote Short and others: “We can’t remain silent on this.” I offered an alternative: I would go back on the road. Instead, I was told we’d have a task force meeting two days later. There’d be no press conference, but at least the task force would meet for the first time in weeks.
In the intervening day, I wrote to Jared Kushner, Matt Pottinger, Mark Meadows, Tucker Obenshain—everyone and anyone I could think of who might have access to and influence with the president. Again, I made the case that this was the tipping point. We were within days of a public health crisis that would spin out of control. We needed the president to deliver the message that we had solutions, but that they needed to be enacted. Eager to get my governor’s reports out, I wrote to John Gray, Tucker Obenshain, and Marc Short that twenty-six states were then in full resurgence. I asked that we restore the previous bullet points and a summary of what had been done over the summer to control the surge. The governor’s reports came back fully approved. I had to wonder if the administration had even read the points I’d made in the reports, or simply rubber-stamped them.
In that first task force meeting in November, I laid it on the line. Every American needed to wear a mask indoors. To bridge the gap until we had a vaccine, social interactions for the next sixty days needed to be limited to immediate household members as much as possible. Retail businesses should remain open. Limit indoor dining and expand outdoor dining. Schools could be kept open. Testing in schools should increase.
Resistance came from all sides, and in familiar guises. Even with what we now knew with great certainty about masks, mandating the use of them just wasn’t practical or enforceable, I was told. Sixty days of social “isolation” with only your family was too much like a lockdown, they said.
In response to my direct tone, Marc Short said, “You don’t have to lash out like this. You’re clearly very distressed.”
Without directly addressing the antiwoman language, I responded that I was neither distressed (read: too emotional) nor lashing out. Though I was sending out a clear distress signal, trying to get the attention of key people in the administration who could alert the American people that the time to act was now.
Frustrated that my sense of urgency was, again, being viewed as just another woman’s failure to keep her emotions in check, and finding no traction in the task force meeting of the twelfth, I contacted Covid Huddle allies Jared and his associates Brad and Adam: “We cannot remain silent.” The president needed to address the American people. He had to set the tone. He had to tell the truth.
Jared wrote to let me know he’d try. But to no avail: The president wouldn’t agree to lead a press conference. Instead, Vice President Pence got permission to hold one, on November 19, the week before Thanksgiving. This would give us time to alert Americans of the seriousness of the situation and the need to show prudence regarding decisions about holding family gatherings. This was some headway, but I feared it wouldn’t be enough.
From November 10, when I first got confirmation that the task force would meet again, until November 19, when Vice President Pence would speak, we saw another 15,000 Covid-19 deaths. The rise in infections was more precipitous—from Election Day to the vice president’s press conference, an additional 2.3 million cases of Covid-19 brought the U.S. total to nearly 12.5 million for the year. This raised ramp would launch these totals into an even sharper rise after Thanksgiving. For this reason, Thanksgiving messaging was key. We had seen surges triggered by family and friend gatherings, and Thanksgiving was the biggest one such gathering on the horizon.
The efforts to marginalize me or remove my voice from the conversation were ongoing. On November 13, the president was briefed on vaccine progress. As an Operation Warp Speed board member, I’d attended every presidential briefing before. This time, I was excluded.
Prior to the Washington Post leak and the “distressed” message I’d delivered at the first postelection task force meeting, I’d nearly always been the first to speak and to raise the issues that I believed, as response coordinator, needed the most attention. But when we met again on the seventeenth, I found that the vice president’s staff, who created the agenda for task force meetings, had placed me eighth out of the eight presenters. Discussion of vaccines now took top priority. This was a harbinger of things to come. It was certainly important to monitor the progress of vaccine production, but for too long now, the administration had communicated the message that the coming vaccines constituted a silver bullet fired at the virus. This posed a real danger.
When it was my turn to speak, I once again shared the bad news that cases were rising and the virus was spreading everywhere. I reminded all task force attendees that vaccines were just one part of the plan. Without these other elements in place, the vaccines’ very real limitations, vaccine hesitancy, and inequitable distribution would seriously diminish their impact. Once again, I got looks that said, You’re an alarmist. In the eyes of Marc Short and others in the West Wing, I was crying wolf and had been since March 2, 2020. Yet, in the last thirty days, cases had increased by 276 percent, new hospital admissions had increased by 81 percent, and daily death rates had increased by 73 percent.
They didn’t want to hear what I had to say, and they didn’t want to act. They had the solution: vaccines were needed, and nothing else.
Meanwhile, it was no longer just postelection absenteeism that was making it difficult to connect and communicate inside the White House. Ever more staffers were becoming infected and working from home; crucially, Mark Meadows was among them. The White House suffered wave after wave of outbreaks.
So, there we were, on November 19, at the first task force briefing since July. Vice President Pence announced to the press that we had gathered again as directed by President Trump—but Trump himself was not present. The president had made a concession to my request for a briefing, but his absence spoke loudly and forcefully. I’ve got other matters more pressing than this. I’ve got an election to overturn. That’s where my commitment lies.
While the vice president, at my urging, did mention several times that case figures were rising, he began his words with a nod to the imminent approval of the vaccines. The tone and intent of his remarks was encapsulated in one statement: “America has never been more prepared to combat this virus than today.” This was true. We knew what worked—but we needed to ensure every American was using what worked. I kept my expression neutral, but inside, I felt dismay. I’d pressed the vice president to speak honestly, to raise the alarm about what we faced in the coming weeks with families across the nation gathering. His tone implied hope for the future and acknowledged our better state of preparedness, but with the worst surge yet to come, I had wanted a call to action!
When it was my turn at the microphone, I tempered his optimism by beginning my remarks with the need for the American people to increase their vigilance. For nearly every reference the vice president had made to the promise of a vaccine, I mentioned the need for mitigation. We had always talked about building a bridge to the vaccines, but I needed to make clear: that bridge could carry only so much weight before it collapsed. I also made clear that the coming surge was likely going to be worse than previous ones, but that we already knew what to do to keep that from happening.
Steve Hahn, Bob Redfield, Jerome Adams, and I followed up this first press briefing in four months by heading out across the country to deliver our message in person. We wanted to spread the good news that even without vaccines available, we could slow this aggressive surge if we met it with mitigation measures of the same intensity. Vaccines were welcome, but they were no substitute for personal, institutional, and governmental will. We would travel to as many places and cover as many miles as necessary to inject the proven components of our plan into the minds of those willing to listen to the truth.
We were three weeks too late. While “Better late than never” applied to some things, like belated birthday greetings, it did not apply here. The rise in incidence we’d seen on this trip, eleven months after the beginning of the pandemic, would soon show that we were starting from too far behind—and quickly losing time. Again and again, across this country we had failed to remember this simple bit of pandemic math: Lost time equals lost lives. And no calling for a recount would ever enable us to make up that deficit.
I wanted to ensure that no mixed messages were sent to the Biden team. After David Kessler’s Election Eve query about the status of vaccine approval, we hadn’t been in touch since. While a formal process existed for the transition, outside of it, on November 29, I alerted him to the fact that now more than ever, he needed to keep the Biden team on point and safe. Kessler and I would soon meet with the Biden Covid-19 transition and data people, but I felt this particular message couldn’t wait. The same was true for how I felt about the rest of the country. They needed to know that vigilance was everything.
Two weeks after Thanksgiving, by December 10, when infections from Thanksgiving gatherings revealed themselves, the United States would confirm a total of 16.2 million cases. By the end of the year, when the virus was passed from person to person along with the Christmas gifts and eggnog, we’d see that rate rise to a total of 21 million cases. In those three weeks, more than 5 million more people would be infected, daily new cases would rise from 145,000 to 249,000, and an additional 58,000 people would lose their lives. There would be no happy New Year.