Coronavirus: Thread

[grarpamp]

'Deep State' Was Working Against Trump On COVID-19 Response: Dr. Paul Alexander
by Harry Lee and Roman Balmakov

https://www.theepochtimes.com/deep-state-was-working-against-trump-on-covid-19-response-paul-alexander_4429415.html

https://coronavirus.house.gov/sites/democrats.coronavirus.house.gov/files/2021-04-08.Clyburn%20to%20Alexander%20re%20COVID%20Response%20.pdf
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/20/health/covid-cdc-data.html
https://www.theepochtimes.com/cdc-removes-24-percent-of-child-covid-19-deaths-thousands-of-others_4345083.html
https://www.theepochtimes.com/cdc-responds-after-reporting-fewer-covid-19-pediatric-deaths_4348279.html
https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-lockdown-united-states-entire-country-anthony-fauci-cdc-2020-4
https://www.theepochtimes.com/nonprofit-sues-hhs-to-immediately-stop-emergency-use-authorization-of-covid-19-vaccine_3913266.html
https://www.thejournal.ie/factcheck-pcr-tests-irish-video-5304097-Dec2020/
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/29/health/coronavirus-testing.html
https://www.cdc.gov/csels/dls/locs/2021/07-21-2021-lab-alert-Changes_CDC_RT-PCR_SARS-CoV-2_Testing_1.html
https://www.theepochtimes.com/california-ny-failed-in-handling-covid-19-florida-among-the-best-report_4396306.html
https://www.theepochtimes.com/giving-the-right-name-to-the-virus-causing-a-worldwide-pandemic-2_3277200.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/after-months-of-favor-birx-raises-trumps-ire-with-grim-coronavirus-assessment/2020/08/03/5df72f16-d5a8-11ea-9c3b-dfc394c03988_story.html
https://www.theepochtimes.com/we-need-accountability-for-failed-covid-19-policies-dr-scott-atlas_4355254.html


According to Paul Alexander, when former President Donald Trump was
trying to tackle COVID-19 in 2020, the “swamp” or the “deep state” was
working against him, using flawed data to tarnish him, locking down
society, and keeping schools closed.

    “Can you imagine the president of the United States fighting
against the [teachers’] union, fighting against the [Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)], fighting against his own task
force?” Alexander told EpochTV’s “Facts Matter” program in an
interview that will air on May 3.

    “They’re working against him. So you need to be there to
understand when he said ‘the swamp’ - and he talked about deep state -
it is real. I dealt with them. It is the bureaucracy. The entrenched
bureaucracy is real.”

>From late March till early September 2020, Alexander served as
scientific adviser to Michael Caputo, then-assistant secretary for
public affairs at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

Dr. Paul Alexander in an interview with EpochTV's "Facts Matter"
program. The interview is scheduled to premier on May 3rd, 2022.
(Screenshot via The Epoch Times)

During that time, Alexander was attacked by the media and some health
agency officials for trying to “tweak” the COVID-19 death numbers in
the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR).

On Aug. 8, 2020, in an email to Caputo (pdf) and other officials,
Alexander wrote:

    “CDC to me appears to be writing hit pieces on the administration
and meant at this time to impact school re-openings and they then send
it to the media knowing it is deceiving. I ask it be stopped now! …
Nothing to go out unless I read and agree with the findings how they
CDC, wrote it and I tweak it to ensure it is fair and balanced and
‘complete.’ And not misleading.”

At the time, Alexander also pushed for herd immunity to handle the
pandemic, insisting the only way to do so was to allow the
non-high-risk groups to expose themselves to the virus.

Former Trump campaign official Michael Caputo arrives at the Hart
Senate Office building to be interviewed by Senate Intelligence
Committee staffers, in Washington on May 1, 2018. (Mark Wilson/Getty
Images)

However, some media outlets depicted Alexander’s proposal as trying to
get people infected intentionally. They also claimed that Caputo was
promoting unfounded accusations and conspiracy theories in a Facebook
video. Pressure from the media and some government officials later led
to the departure of Caputo and Alexander.

On Sept. 16, 2020, HHS announced that Caputo would take a 60-day
medical leave of absence, and Alexander would leave the department.

    “New York Times wrote—now it’s part of the public discussion—that
the CDC reporting to the public and the data is suboptimal. It’s
incomplete. It’s not balanced. It’s missing information. So that is
exactly what I was trying to say two years ago, that I was attacked
for,” said Alexander.

The New York Times on Feb. 20 reported that the CDC has been
withholding critical COVID-19 data on boosters, hospitalizations, and
other analyses. A CDC spokesperson told the outlet that one reason is
the agency was afraid the data might be misinterpreted as the vaccines
being ineffective.

In March, the CDC quietly removed 72,277 deaths, including 416 among
children, that were said to have been from COVID-19 from its data
tracker web page.

    “The CDC removed 72,000 deaths. Why? I will say it this way, under
the Trump administration, the CDC worked with the [National Institutes
of Health (NIH)]  and the media to make the response terrible for him.
Make it look, on a day-to-day basis, terrible, like bad. And they will
do that with the numbers. They will report escalating infections,
escalating cases, any which way they could,” said Alexander.

    “But now, in the present administration, they want to remove those
deaths and those problematic metrics because it makes the present
administration look bad. Fact is that more people have died from COVID
under President [Joe] Biden than died under President Trump.”

The CDC responded that the change was to make the data more accurate.

“CDC constantly reviews our COVID-19 data to ensure its accuracy,” a
CDC spokesperson told The Epoch Times via email last month, adding
that “CDC’s algorithm was accidentally counting deaths that were not
COVID-19-related.”
Lockdown Based on Flawed Numbers

In early April 2020, the United States reported more than 260,000
COVID-19 cases and about 6,200 deaths. On April 1, 2020, Trump said he
would leave it up to state governments to decide whether to implement
lockdowns. A day later, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National
Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told CNN that there
should be a federal lockdown. “I don’t understand why that’s not
happening,” he said.

On March 20, 2020, California became the first state to order a
lockdown. By the end of May 2020, 42 states and territories issued
mandatory stay-at-home orders.

Alexander said the lockdowns were based on flawed numbers, and no
study showed they work.

    “They closed society on a test that had a 97 percent false
positive,” said Alexander, referring to the PCR test that is still
widely used to determine a positive COVID-19 infection.

    “And remember, at that point, we were having problems in terms of
how deaths were classified, how COVID infections were classified, and
whether we were really having such an extensive number of infections
or cases or hospitalizations,” Alexander said.

HHS has been criticized for changing the rules for writing death
certificates so that deaths were primarily attributable to COVID-19.
The agency has also been targeted for a high number of false-positive
COVID-19 results from PCR tests that were authorized for emergency
use.

“We were having a problem at that point with the PCR test. The PCR
tests [were] over-cycled, and we knew over 24 cycles,” said Alexander.
“Once you cycle over 24, 25, you are picking up viral dust and viral
junk, non-infectious, non-viable pathogens. So let me put it this way,
the vast majority, maybe 90 percent of people in 2020 and 2021, who
were designated as COVID-positive with PCR tests were false-positive.”

A medical worker places a nasal swab into a test tube after performing
a COVID-19 PCR test at East Boston Neighborhood Health Center in
Boston, Mass., on Dec. 20, 2021. (Joseph Prezioso/AFPvia Getty Images)

An Irish doctor first claimed that PCR tests have a false rate of 97
percent. Some fact-checkers deemed the claim as false.

One fact-checker interviewed Harvard professor Michael Mina, an
epidemiologist, who said the claim was not true and “a clear
misunderstanding of the PCR primers.”

However, Mina also told The New York Times in 2021 that “in
Massachusetts, from 85 to 90 percent of people who tested positive in
last July with a cycle threshold of 40 would have been deemed negative
if the threshold were 30 cycles.”

On July 21, 2021, the CDC announced it would withdraw the request for
an emergency use authorization for the agency-developed PCR test after
Dec. 31, saying the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has authorized
“hundreds” of other COVID-specific tests.

“We’ve argued from the beginning, this was never an emergency that
they made it out to be,” said Alexander. “We could have properly
protected the vulnerable and let the rest of society live largely
normal lives.”

Earlier this month, a study showed that states with strict lockdowns
and other restrictive measures, such as California, New York, and New
Jersey, handled the pandemic poorly. Florida, which ditched COVID-19
restrictions early, performed among the best states.

    “Trump was working to open society and to open schools. And he had
a daily battle with that task force that what you saw there—that was
like a clown car show—that was real. Behind the scenes, Trump was
fighting them, fighting Fauci, fighting [Dr. Deborah] Birx, and the
union, and the CDC to open schools because we were getting reports of
young children in America hanging themselves. Children across America
committed suicide because of the school closures,” said Alexander.

President Donald Trump and Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National
Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, listen to White House
coronavirus response coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx speak in the Rose
Garden at the White House in Washington on March 29, 2020. (Tasos
Katopodis/Getty Images)

In July 2020, Fauci warned parents to send kids back to school in the
fall semester, saying a study showed kids over 9 years old could
transmit the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus as well as adults.
The authors of the study later issued a correction, saying they could
not define what direction transmission was happening within their
study.

Birx, then-White House COVID-19 task force coordinator, told media in
August 2020, “If you have high caseload and active community spread …
we are asking people to distance learn at this moment, so we can get
this epidemic under control.”

According to Dr. Scott Atlas, former special adviser to Trump on the
coronavirus pandemic, only the three most influential doctors on the
task force—Birx, Fauci, and then-CDC Director Dr. Robert
Redfield—could advise governors to implement lockdowns.

(L-R) Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious
Diseases Anthony Fauci, Response coordinator for White House
Coronavirus Task Force Deborah Birx, and CDC Director Robert R.
Redfield attend the daily briefing on COVID-19 in the Brady Briefing
Room at the White House in Washington on April 8, 2020. ( Mandel
Ngan/AFP via Getty Images)

    “We could have handled this pandemic just by properly protecting
the vulnerable and allowing everybody else to live a normal life,
become exposed naturally and harmlessly among their own natural
immunity,” said Alexander.

    “That’s how we do it for the last 100 years. But with COVID, we’ve
done something different. We lock the healthy society down.”

Alexander said he once had a discussion with some State Department
officials talking about Trump.

“They told me in no uncertain terms that: ‘Trump is only a visitor
here. He doesn’t seem to understand we run things.’”

“‘We the bureaucracy, we the deep state that you call the deep state
pal, yes, we run things here. The president just visits here. He’ll be
gone. We’ll be here,’” recalled Alexander.

“That’s how they think. And that is the crux of the matter.”