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Not a Joke: The Trump Admin Hired a Dog Breeder to Run Its Coronavirus Task Force
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/04/brian-harrison-dog-breeder-coronavirus#intcid=recommendations_vanity-fair-right-rail-popular_d32cb7f7-96fb-4ced-ba7d-84d478c1c827_popular4-1The unfortunate thing about the Trump administration, beyond the nepotism, incompetence, mass corruption, idiot kids, white nationalism, wholesale assault on the concept of truth, and pure evil, is that oftentimes it’s beyond parody. For instance, we already knew the federal government’s response to the coronavirus crisis has been catastrophically bad, from the months of insisting the virus was fake news, to a criminal lack of early—and current!—testing, to listening to Dr. Jared Kushner’s advice on the matter, to pushing for a dangerously premature reopening of the country. But despite everything we know, it would just be too much to learn that, at one point, a dog breeder was running the administration’s coronavirus task force. And yet!
Reuters reports the nearly impossible-to-believe news that back in January, Health and Human Services secretary Alex Azar “tapped a trusted aide with minimal public health experience to lead the agency’s day-to-day response to COVID-19.” The aide was Brian Harrison, 37, and the move was somewhat surprising, given that prior to joining the administration in 2018 as Azar’s deputy chief of staff, he spent six years running a company called Dallas Labradoodles, which is not, in fact, some kind of code name for a firm doing cutting-edge medical research or developing vaccines or doing anything remotely related to humans. Instead, Dallas Labradoodles, which Harrison sold for $225,000 in April 2018, pretty much does exactly what you’d expect: sells Australian Labradoodles, which are a cross between poodles and Labrador retrievers. Which are actually quite cute dogs! They are supposedly “friendly, social, loyal, loving, smart, curious, and happy”! Which is nice for the people adopting them, though less helpful vis-à-vis the pandemic that has killed more than 47,000 Americans to date and infected over 850,000! Funny how that works!
This January, Harrison became a key manager of the HHS virus response. “Everyone had to report up through him,” said one HHS official. 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. Harrison decided, the sources say, to exclude FDA commissioner Stephen Hahn from the task force. “He said he didn’t need to be included,” said one official with knowledge of the matter.... The HHS denied it was Harrison’s decision to leave out Hahn and the FDA, but declined to say who made the call. The agency lauded Harrison’s work on the task force. 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.”
Reuters reports the nearly impossible-to-believe news that back in January, Health and Human Services secretary Alex Azar “tapped a trusted aide with minimal public health experience to lead the agency’s day-to-day response to COVID-19.” The aide was Brian Harrison, 37, and the move was somewhat surprising, given that prior to joining the administration in 2018 as Azar’s deputy chief of staff, he spent six years running a company called Dallas Labradoodles, which is not, in fact, some kind of code name for a firm doing cutting-edge medical research or developing vaccines or doing anything remotely related to humans. Instead, Dallas Labradoodles, which Harrison sold for $225,000 in April 2018, pretty much does exactly what you’d expect: sells Australian Labradoodles, which are a cross between poodles and Labrador retrievers. Which are actually quite cute dogs! They are supposedly “friendly, social, loyal, loving, smart, curious, and happy”! Which is nice for the people adopting them, though less helpful vis-à-vis the pandemic that has killed more than 47,000 Americans to date and infected over 850,000! Funny how that works!
This January, Harrison became a key manager of the HHS virus response. “Everyone had to report up through him,” said one HHS official. 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. Harrison decided, the sources say, to exclude FDA commissioner Stephen Hahn from the task force. “He said he didn’t need to be included,” said one official with knowledge of the matter.... The HHS denied it was Harrison’s decision to leave out Hahn and the FDA, but declined to say who made the call. The agency lauded Harrison’s work on the task force. 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.”
The rest at link.
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