President Donald Trump demonstrated he was serious about fulfilling his campaign promise to lower health insurance costs by appointing as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services Alex Azar II, a former pharmaceutical executive who had tripled the cost of insulin while he was a top executive at Eli Lilly.
Azar was once fined for colluding with Mexico to keep drug prices high, Scientific American reported.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-you-need-to-know-about-alex-azar-trumps-hhs-nominee/
Trump also demonstrated that he was serious about fulfilling his campaign promise to end the high number of immigrants crossing into the United States by detaining those who crossed and then having the HHS Department separate children from their mothers and/or fathers.
Azar, the secretary of the department that protects the health and welfare of those in the United States, characterized the separation of immigrant mothers and their children as “one of the great acts of American generosity and charity.”
So separating children from their mothers is “one of the great acts of American generosity and charity.”
Really?
Separating mothers and their children works for megapodes and Western fence lizards so why shouldn’t it work for human beings?
What could possibly go wrong?
In April 2020, the New York Times reported that HHS had lost track of 1,500 missing immigrant children.
Having caused irreparable damage to the lives of countless Mexican mothers and children, Azar was appointed chairman of the White House Coronavirus task force. Azar, in coordination with the HHS, the Department of Defense, and the Centers for Disease Control, led the strategy to distribute COVID-19 vaccine, which was called Operation Warp Speed.
Azar promised that Americans would receive “a safe and effective vaccine in record time.”
This did not happen.
The White House endorsed Azar’s claim it could have a hundred million doses of the vaccine distributed to Americans by the end of 2020.
The White House almost made it – falling just 95.8 million doses short.
By January 2, states had only distributed 4.2 million doses.
One former HHS official said of Azar: “He just lies. The biggest lie is that he had it under control. He oversold it.”
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/02/how-the-covid-19-vaccine-rollout-was-hobbled
Azar then announced that the government would begin releasing doses of the vaccine that had been kept in reserve but then admitted that no such vaccines existed.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/01/15/trump-vaccine-reserve-used-up/
Azar went from driving up drug prices, which probably resulted in the deaths of Americans, to separating Mexican immigrant mothers from their children, which resulted in profound emotional scars, to screwing up the distribution of the COVID vaccination, which no doubt led to additional deaths.
More than 400,000 Americans had died of the COVID virus by the end of Trump’s term as president.
Dr. Irwin Redlener, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University, was among the many public health experts who said that the Trump administration’s mishandling of the crisis resulted in countless avoidable deaths.
“This is just one step on an ominous path of fatalities,” he told the Associated Press. “Everything about how it’s been managed has been infused with incompetence and dishonesty, and we’re paying a heavy price,” he said.
