Dr. Peter J. Hotez on How the Federal Government Failed Texas on the Coronavirus
As one of the nation’s leading experts on drug and vaccine delivery, Dr. Peter Hotez, codirector of the Center for Vaccine Development at Texas Children’s Hospital, has become an almost ubiquitous presence on CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News. But while he’s reliably been loath to discuss the politics surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic, across the last week or so, as Texas’s numbers have risen, he’s done a noticeable about-face; he’s begun using his television time to counter a White House narrative he describes as a “fairy tale spun by mediocre people” and to decry “an absence of federal leadership.” He ended a recent tweet about the federal government’s failure to enact an evidence-based plan with a simple “WTF.”
“I’ve really worked hard to only talk about the science and not publicly criticize the White House or other elected officials, but I’ve had to depart from that,” says Hotez, who also serves as dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston and has an endowed chair in tropical pediatrics at Texas Children’s Hospital. “What pushed my hand was the steep rise across our Southern cities, knowing that our low-income neighborhoods are especially getting hit, and, most likely, though the data isn’t in yet, it’s people of color, African American, Hispanic, and Latinx people that are piling into the hospital. So we are as a nation are failing to protect our vulnerable. And I reached a point where not being political, not really getting to the root of the problem, is in itself immoral.”
Hotez believes the White House needs to embrace a three-step process and explain the direness of the pandemic to the public, prioritize a federal strategy, and allow the CDC to take a leadership role that sets real parameters for the states. He blames the White House, not necessarily Governor Abbott and leaders in other states who opened early in the process, for the current resurgence.
“I feel the governors across the Southern states were set up to fail by a federal government that never provided clear-cut directives,” Hotez says. “The strategy was just ‘let the states figure it out and the federal government will work to provide backup’—FEMA support, ventilator manufacturing, and PPE. But they didn’t provide clear-cut epidemiologic models on where each of the states was headed. They failed to provide clear information about what would happen if the states did nothing or if the states opened prematurely. They failed to tell the states, ‘This is what you need to do to save lives.’ And the reason they needed to do that was they were tone deaf to the fact that all of these governors, not just the Texas governor, are buffeted by forces to the left and right. And the governors needed the cover from the federal government to say, ‘Hey guys, look, I hear what you’re saying, but the CDC and the federal government is telling me if I don’t do X, Y, and Z, this many lives are going to be lost.’ And that would have given a lot of the governors a lot of cover to do what needed to be done. And so I place the blame squarely in the hands of the government and CDC for not being proactive and out there in the lead.”
Read more: https://www.texasmonthly.com/podcast/peter-hotez-federal-government-failed-texas-coronavirus/
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“[N]ot being political, not really getting to the root of the problem, is in itself immoral.”
-Laelth
