Documents Reveal Massive Political Influence From Trump's Team To Downplay Pandemic

Newly-revealed documents have shown a clear pattern of suppression with regards to the science and the reality of the pandemic while Donald Trump was still president. The former administration was worried that the pandemic was going to hurt them politically, so instead of showing that they could lead the nation through a crisis, they decided to hide the truth from the public and cause unnecessary deaths in the process. Ring of Fire's Farron Cousins explains what these new documents tell us.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

According to recently released documents, which includes emails, text messages and other communications that were acquired by the House select subcommittee on the coronavirus crisis, the Trump administration in the early days of the pandemic and of course stretching beyond the early days of the pandemic, actively interfered with the scientists at the centers for disease control. They muzzled them. Wouldn't let them talk to the press. They altered the data. They suppressed data that didn't fit with Trump's narrative that, oh, everything's going to be fine in a couple of days, we're about to be down to zero cases. They actively interfered with all of this public health information in order to help Donald Trump politically. This should be shocking to absolutely no one. Okay. We've pretty much known this. I know we've all at least suspected it and of course there have been other reports here and there telling us this exact same thing.

But the reason this is important is because this is the first time we get to see this in their own documents. So it's no longer just a hunch. It's no longer just hearsay. Like, oh no, this person said. Uh-ah, it's in their documents, smoking gun evidence that this is what happened during the Trump administration. So here's just a couple of the things that we can pull out of these documents that we know for sure happened. First and foremost, one of the biggest ones was that they were pushing for herd immunity, even as they're telling us that, hey, don't worry about it. Everything's going to be fine in a couple of days. They were hoping everybody would get sick so we could reach herd immunity, which would take more than 70% of the population. And then, hey, everybody's fine. Everybody's protected. We can move on from this.

So they were pushing her to immunity instead of things like shutdowns and mask wearing and social distancing. And of course this was not long ago, folks. I know we all remember those early days of this. We also know, as I previously mentioned, members of the CDC were effectively muzzled. They were not allowed to talk to the press. They could not go out there and talk numbers. Everything basically had to go through the coronavirus task force set up by Donald Trump run by Mike Pence and Jared Kushner. And of course, Trump was out there doing his daily press conferences every day, where he said some of the dumbest things that he said throughout his entire administration. The United States has now seen more than 760,000 Americans die from COVID-19, 760,000 people in this country sent to an early grave because of COVID-19.

We could not have prevented all of these deaths by any stretch. We could have prevented, as Dr. Deborah Birx has said, who was a part of the Trump administration's response team, could have prevented maybe 40% of them though. Maybe cut them down by half. All the administration had to do was take it seriously from day one, but they didn't because they were afraid of how it was going to affect Donald Trump and of course the great irony of that, is that if it weren't for his bungling of the pandemic, he would probably still be president today. So the very thing they were trying to prevent from happening is what ended up happening all along and hundreds of thousands of Americans died along the way.