Virus taskforce sidelined with reopenings
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 the U.S. would suffer between 60,000 and 70,000 deaths from the outbreak. At least 107,000 Americans have died.
“I think we’ve done a great job,” he said at the time.
The task force is now reduced to weekly closeddoor 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 on 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.
On Friday, Trump will visit a factory producing nasal swabs in Maine, where he’ll likely tout progress toward restoring the U.S. economy. The Republican Party is meanwhile racing to relocate Trump’s re-nomination convention after North Carolina’s governor, Roy Cooper, insisted on reducing crowd sizes and other health precautions if it was held as planned in Charlotte.
“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. “It’s like the third inning of a baseball game, and we’re down 8-2, and the manager concludes the game is over, says we’ve won, and walks out."Fauci told CNN this week that he hadn’t spoken with Trump in two weeks. A spokeswoman said Fauci declined to comment for this story.
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 in May that there was a correlation between states reopening and virus caseloads falling.