Emails show that throughout the worst public health crisis in a century, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp repeatedly disregarded advice from the state’s top health official, federal scientists, and other experts, an examination by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution found.
The state’s flagship newspaper on Friday published its analysis of Kemp’s COVID-19 response. The AJC says it based its reporting, in part, on 15,751 pages of emails obtained under the Georgia Open Records Act.
After examining those emails and other data, the newspaper concludes Kemp’s administration was “slow to act on early warnings about the pandemic’s severity. The governor’s aides, not public health officials, often determined strategy to contain the virus and dictated public messaging. And the state withheld critical information showing the pandemic was worsening as Kemp lifted restrictions.”
The article points out that, despite warnings from top epidemiologists, the governor refused for weeks to shut down businesses or impose other restrictions when the outbreak began.
Kemp was one of the nation’s last governors to issue lockdown orders last spring and among the first to begin lifting them, 22 days later. He never mandated masks and even balked at local mask mandates, at one point threatening to sue Atlanta over its mask requirements.
AJC reporter Alan Judd writes: “And as hundreds of thousands of Georgians contracted COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, and the death toll rose from hundreds to a few thousand to, now, approaching 20,000, Kemp declined to adjust his strategy and put into place new restrictions to slow the virus’ spread.”
Economy over health
In the article, Judd lays out the timeline of how the pandemic evolved in Georgia and how the governor and his staff responded. The article indicates Kemp repeatedly ignored recommendations from Georgia’s Public Health Commissioner Dr. Kathleen Toomey and “most often ranked economic concerns above public health imperatives.” He did this while assuring the public he was following Dr. Toomey’s recommendations and public health guidance.
Additionally, the AJC claims, Toomey lacked autonomy in delivering her own public assessments of the pandemic.
“The governor’s office approved Toomey’s remarks for weekly telephone briefings of state legislators. It oversaw her responses to inquiries from federal health officials.”
Kemp’s communications director Cody Hall said Toomey was free to edit the talking points, speeches, and other remarks Kemp’s aides drafted for her, “but the governor’s office wanted to ‘ensure consistent and accurate information was being provided to the public.'”
“It’s one thing to say you’re following the science; it’s another thing to shoehorn the science into what you want it to be,” said Amber Schmidtke, a public health researcher who formerly taught at Mercer University’s medical school. “A lot of people were hurt, and a lot of people died when they didn’t need to.”
Both Kemp and Toomey declined to be interviewed for the article, the newspaper states.
Hall disputed some of the Journal-Constitution’s conclusions and said many other states “fared no better against COVID-19 than Georgia did” despite having imposed stricter controls.
The Journal-Constitution reports that its staff requested the documents from the state Department of Public Health on May 13, 2020. DPH turned over the documents on January 28, 2021 – 8 1/2 months after the law requires and then only after the newspaper threatened legal action.
