Dr. Birx offered a chilling warning about the coronavirus but refused to play the blame game
Dr. Deborah Birx, right, appears with Chuck Todd on Sunday’s “Meet the Press.” (Courtesy: NBC News)
The spread of COVID-19 is bad right now in the United States. Really bad.
And it’s about to get worse.
Thanksgiving gatherings almost assuredly will lead to more spikes in cases and deaths in the weeks to come. We could see the beginnings of this horrific surge starting this week.
And Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, also knows who is else to blame for the dramatic increase in those contracting and dying from COVID-19.
During an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, Birx told moderator Chuck Todd, “Right now, across the Sunbelt, we have governors and mayors who have cases equivalent to what they had in the summertime, yet aren’t putting in the same policies and mitigations that they put in the summer that they know changed the course of this pandemic. This is the worst event that this country will face not just from a public health side, yet we know what behaviors spread the virus and we know how to change those behaviors to stop spreading the virus.”
Todd, astutely, tried to get Birx to call out which governors and officials specifically she was talking about and which states need to immediately do better. But Birx wouldn’t name names.
“Every state across this country needs to increase their mitigation and every state needs to be critically informing their state population that the gatherings we saw on Thanksgiving will lead to a surge — it will happen this week and next week,” Birx said. “We cannot go into the holiday season — Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanza — with the same kind of attitude that: ‘Those gatherings don’t apply to me.’ They apply to everyone, if you don’t want to lose your grandparents, your aunt.”
As Trump’s administration comes to a close, might we start seeing more appearances and more forthcoming interviews from the likes of Birx like we saw on Sunday? It would have been good, though, to see Birx answer Todd’s question about naming names. Perhaps calling them out publicly would push them to make immediate changes.
Nevertheless, Todd concluded his interview with Birx by taking a bit of a shot at President Donald Trump by saying, “I appreciate you coming on and sharing these dire warnings. I hope your boss also hears the same dire warnings that you're telling the rest of us. Thank you for coming on.”
Best correction
Fox News’ Chris Wallace. (Olivier Douliery/Pool via AP, File)
Kudos to Fox News’ Chris Wallace for correcting Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar three times after Azar called Joe Biden the “vice president.”
During an interview on “Fox News Sunday,” Azar referred to Biden as, “Vice President Biden.” Wallace quickly jumped in and said, “He's the president-elect, sir. He’s the president-elect.” Azar kept talking, but after he was done with his answer, Wallace once again said, “First of all, it's the President-Elect Joe Biden, Secretary Azar.”
Good for Wallace.
Wallace correcting Azar on Biden’s title wasn’t the only pushback Azar got during the interview. Wallace questioned Azar about what he called Trump’s “massive failure” in dealing with the coronavirus and, later, he asked Azar, “If President Trump had worn a mask then and urged everyone to wear a mask then, back in April, the way Joe Biden is right now, wouldn’t we be in much better shape?”
Other Sunday morning moderators push back, too
Wallace wasn’t the only Sunday morning show moderator to criticize Trump — from COVID-19 failures to reckless allegations of voter fraud
CBS “Face the Nation” moderator Margaret Brennan said, “Obsessed with his alternative reality of so-called voting irregularities, the president refuses to deal with what his health advisers warn could be a surge on top of a surge in coronavirus cases and deaths facing the U.S. in the next few months.”
While interviewing Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), NBC “Meet the Press” moderator Chuck Todd said, “The frustration is, why is it that we can’t have even Washington unified, why can’t even you guys in the United States Senate come together and everybody say, ‘Hey, let’s wear a mask?’ It does seem absurd how polarized we’ve gotten over this and it does seem to emanate from one individual — the president.”
Best questioning
On his “This Week” show on ABC, moderator George Stephanopoulos grilled Sen. Mike Braun (R-Ind) by saying, “There have been more than 55 lawsuits brought forward by the president and his allies, 38 have been dismissed by judges. There have been investigations directed by the Justice Department, by the attorney general. The attorney general came back and said there’s no evidence of widespread fraud. So the process has played out, hasn’t it? And there’s no evidence of widespread fraud. Why can’t you accept the results?”
Braun started to answer by saying, “I think it’s easy to say it’s played out because that might be the most convenient thing to say” and then he brought up a debunked video about alleged fraud in Georgia.
Stephanopoulos was having none of it.
“Well, I have to stop you right there,” Stephanopoulos said. “That was exactly the proper process for counting the ballots. There wasn’t anything wrong shown in that video at all. So you’re just throwing out a claim out there that doesn’t prove what you’re saying.”
It was an embarrassing moment for Braun, but a rather strong one for Stephanopoulos.
Sunday morning stars
If you review the above couple of items here in the newsletter, you will see strong moments by all the network Sunday morning moderators: NBC’s Chuck Todd, ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, CBS’s Margaret Brennan and Fox’s Chris Wallace.
All four do well each and every week, but it was a particularly strong Sunday for all of them.
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