With the constantly shifting litany of excuses that selfish conservatives have used to refuse to wear masks or get vaccinated, it can sometimes be hard to remember what their issue was in the beginning.

They just didn’t believe the virus was real.

If that seems pretty stupid almost two years later, that’s because it was stupid. We look back on that now the same way we will look back on people now arguing that their own antibodies should protect them.

But in what you will note is a rare bit of compassion from me for the terminally dumb, I’d like to offer them a meager defense. They were literally being tricked by the people they trusted most. In fact, more than 130,000 people could have been spared an untimely demise, if only Trump had cared more about telling America the truth than he did about getting reelected. Perhaps more, considering the snowball effect created by how long Trump spent denying how bad the problem was.

The latest evidence of this comes from Dr. Scarf Lady, AKA Deborah Birx. You remember her as the onetime COVID response coordinator under Donald Trump who sat and winced as he said increasingly ridiculous things in the James Brady Briefing Room.

While it’s tempting to lump her in with the rest of the cast of characters who allowed Trump to go out in public and tell people to drink bleach and stick flashlights up their backsides, the fact is, she’s coming clean now. Maybe that will help, but probably not.

In testimony before congressional investigators, Birx explained that Scott Atlas, Trump’s main advisor on coronavirus, created a culture within the White House that made those with more reasonable voices feel marginalized as Trump and Atlas basically pretended there was nothing wrong.

I made it clear that I would not attend meetings where he would be present kind of to create a line in the sand. I just felt that it gave people in the White House an alternative position and data source that would allow them to say, again, here’s Debbie Birx, a federal employee for 40 years, here’s Scott Atlas, an academic, a physician, a thinker versus a technocrat; and I just felt like that was going to make it even more difficult to get across how severe I felt the fall and winter was going to be. And it was my concern over the fall and winter that I didn’t want a 180 degree voice present at critical decision-making meetings.

Atlas was yet another in a long line of Trump picks who either had no experience in what they were chosen for or believed the opposite of what conventional wisdom should have told them. The former president likely selected him after seeing his appearances on Fox News calling the crisis overblown — nothing was more important to Trump, after all, than looking like everything was under control.

To think of the lives that could’ve been saved by simply acknowledging the severity of COVID is an exercise in national regret. And that doesn’t even begin to cover the psychological damage it did to people who now believe that horse deworming medicine is going to save them.

It could be too little, too late for Dr. Birx’s testimony, but at least we know what to look out for in the future.