Alex Azar was one of the White House officials sounding the alarm on the coronavirus early on.
The Health and Human Services secretary tried to bring the virus to the president’s attention and was shut down and pushed aside, The Daily Beast reports.
Azar pressed the White House for an early response but was called an “alarmist” by President Donald Trump and others in the administration.
On Sunday night, Azar’s name was at the end of a Twitter lashing from the president. Trump called out Azar following a New York Times report that stated Azar “directly warned Mr. Trump of the possibility of a pandemic during a call on Jan. 30, the second warning he delivered to the president about the virus in two weeks.”
Trump called the article fake and tweeted that Azar “told me nothing until later.”
Azar was tapped to run the administration’s response to the pandemic until Trump turned the job over to Vice President Mike Pence on Feb. 26. Azar has been on the sidelines ever since and it could be because he has clashed with the president’s response to the outbreak. Trump denied Azar was benched and called it "fake news."
“He’s happy to suck up to the president once in a while, but he’s not going to change data or tell lies for anybody,” a source who worked with Azar in the pharmaceutical industry told The Daily Beast. “He’s a highly ethical person.”
An in-depth look into the first 70 days of the White House’s response to the coronavirus pandemic by The Washington Post indicates Azar contacted the president about the virus on Jan. 18. His conversations about the topic were met with resistance from the president.
Azar was first made aware about an unknown respiratory illness in Wuhan, China from a phone call from the director of the CDC, Robert Redfield, at the beginning of the year. The report says Azar had his chief of staff notify the National Security Council and by Jan. 7 started to convene a task force to draft plans.
Then, Azar looped in the president while he was at Mar-a-Lago. Reports say before Azar could even mention the virus, Trump railed against him for failing to follow through on a ban of flavored vaping products.
That isn’t the only time Azar tried to get the administration’s attention. He called National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien, who was out of the country with Trump, on Jan. 22. He told O’Brien it was “mayhem” at the White House with no one in charge and aides demanding multiple duplicative briefings.
He then argued for a multi-billion dollar supplemental budget request, but it was rejected by aides who said it was too high.
During Trump’s State of the Union address, Azar called Russell Vought, the acting director of the Office of Management and Budget, who told him to submit a proposal. Aides didn’t like that Azar went around them to submit the $4 billion proposal, which led to a shouting match in the Situation Room. His request was nearly cut in half, but then boosted by Congress, leading to more animosity toward him.
Azar has been replaced at coronavirus task force briefings by Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services administrator Seema Verma, whose agency reports to Azar.