WASHINGTON - On Jan 21, the day the first US case of coronavirus was reported, the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services appeared on Fox News to report the latest on the disease as it ravaged China. Alex Azar, a 52-year-old lawyer and former drug industry executive, assured Americans the US government was prepared.
Shortly after his televised comments, Azar tapped a trusted aide with minimal public health experience to lead the agency's day-to-day response to Covid-19. The aide, Brian Harrison, had joined the department after running a dog-breeding business for six years. Five sources say some officials in the White House derisively called him"the dog breeder.
The lack of tests"limited hospitals' ability to monitor the health of patients and staff," the HHS Inspector General said in a report this month. The equipment shortage"put staff and patients at risk." Michael Caputo, the new chief HHS spokesman, declined to answer Reuters questions about Azar's stewardship, saying in a statement:"We are communicating to the American public during a deadly pandemic."
Before joining the Trump Administration in January 2018, Harrison's official HHS biography says, he"ran a small business in Texas." The biography does not disclose the name or nature of that business, but his personal financial disclosure forms show that from 2012 until 2018 he ran a company called Dallas Labradoodles.
One questionable decision, three sources say, came that month, after the White House announced it was convening a coronavirus task force. The HHS role was to muster resources from key public health agencies: the CDC, FDA, National Institutes of Health, Office of Global Affairs and the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response.
In a statement, Hahn said the FDA was focused on the coronavirus epidemic,"not on when we were added to the task force," and that the agency was not"excluded." Fauci, who has become a public face of the Trump Administration's Covid-19 effort, said he wasn't sure including the FDA was necessary at the start.
"Americans would be well served by having more government officials who have started and worked in small family businesses and fewer trying to use that experience to attack them and distort the record," he wrote.