As Trump urges reopening, task force is fading from view
The White House’s coronavirus task force has all but vanished from public view as President Donald Trump pushes Americans to put the outbreak behind them and resume normal social and economic life.
The task force was once a staple of Trump’s response to the pandemic. From March 4 until late April, the panel held nearly daily, televised briefings at the White House, many headlined by Trump. Its medical experts fanned out across TV networks to share guidance on curbing the spread of the virus.
The last briefing was April 27, when Trump predicted that the U.S. would suffer between 60,000 and 70,000 deaths from the outbreak. At least 107,000 Americans have died.
The task force is now reduced to weekly closed-door meetings with Vice President Mike Pence. Anthony Fauci, the top infectious disease expert in the government, hasn’t spoken publicly at the White House since April 29. In his last task force news conference, a week earlier, he cautioned that the country must “proceed in a very careful, measured way” to reopen.
While it hasn’t been formally mothballed, the task force’s move to the back burner comes as Trump publicly cheers states that are reopening their economies and brushes aside a persistently high number of new infections and deaths every day. There were nearly 20,000 new cases of the disease and almost 1,000 deaths Wednesday, for example, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
“To maintain the health and safety of our society, we must also maintain the health of our economy,” Trump said at the White House last week during a roundtable event encouraging the resumption of economic life.
“This is deeply concerning, and it’s concerning because there’s almost a sense coming out of the White House that the pandemic is somehow over,” said Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute at Harvard University.
Fauci told CNN this week that he
hadn’t spoken with Trump in two weeks. A spokeswoman said Fauci wouldn’t comment for this report.
The task force coordinator, Deborah Birx, joined the president for an event on reopening last week but does not appear in public as frequently as she once did. White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany periodically relays information to reporters that she attributes to Birx, such as asserting last month that there was a correlation between states reopening and virus caseloads falling.
Even within the White House, employees have visibly reduced how frequently they wear masks during briefings. Robert Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, did not speak publicly during any White House event last month and warned lawmakers Thursday that the U.S. is still unprepared for pandemic threats. Adm. Brett Giroir, the assistant health secretary who served as the administration’s testing czar, said Monday during a meeting that he’ll soon return to his regular job, where he leads a Trump initiative to end the U.S. HIV epidemic.
The White House declined to comment, though one adviser signaled that the task force would soon appear publicly again.
“I’d be surprised if there weren’t task force briefings soon,” White House counselor Kellyanne Conway said Tuesday, downplaying questions about its shrinking profile. The administration is “really racing against the clock to keep these therapeutics and vaccines in development” but has pushed enough supplies to states and hospitals in case the outbreak spikes again, she said.
One Democratic governor, Jared Polis of Colorado, said his state’s hospitals are “doing well where we are today” but that he’s concerned about the outbreak resurging from large gatherings and increased socializing.
“We have not received everything that we were expecting from the federal government at any point in this pandemic,” he said, though he immediately added: “We are also grateful for everything that we do receive.”
FEMA, which is essentially leading much of the response coordinated by the task force, said in a statement that the government and private sector had combined to procure over 90 million N95 masks, about 150 million surgical masks, about 14 million face shields, about 37 million gowns and over 1 billion gloves.
As of this week, the government has about 19,800 ventilators in its stockpile, enough that Trump regularly boasts that he’s sending surpluses of the machines to other countries. FEMA declined to say what quantities of other supplies are in stockpile.
There remain several core roles for the federal government to play, Harvard’s Jha said. Chief among them are testing and public guidance. He said he’s spoken with city and state officials who’ve said they don’t have enough information from the government about how to safely reopen and ward off a new wave of infections.
“The message is: You’re on your own — kind of, Godspeed, and hope you figure it out, but the federal government’s not going to help you. And the little bit of guidance they did get came from the task force,” Jha said.
Pence held a call with governors Wednesday, focused on the coronavirus response and testing efforts. “The briefing focused on protecting our most vulnerable Americans including nursing home residents and Americans with underlying health conditions, including those in AfricanAmerican, Hispanic and Native American communities,” Pence’s office said in a statement afterward.