Trump backs off phase-out of task force
Its membership may shift as crisis evolves, he states
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump on Wednesday reversed course on plans to wind down his coronavirus task force, attempting to balance reopening the country with rising infection rates in parts of the nation.
Democrats criticized Trump’s reopening strategy Wednesday, saying more federal support for testing and contact tracing is needed.
One day after the administration suggested that its work would be done around Memorial Day, Trump said the White House task force of public health professionals and senior government officials would continue after all, indefinitely, with its focus shifting toward rebooting the economy and the development of a vaccine.
“I thought we could wind it down sooner,” Trump said, adding, “I had no idea how popular the task force is.”
White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany later said the task force had “gotten our country through this,” and Trump had decided it was “here to stay.”
While the task force has already been meeting less frequently, its medical experts, particularly Drs. Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx, have emerged as among the most trusted voices on the virus response. The Tuesday announcement of ending the task force sparked concerns that they would be sidelined as the outbreak continues and fears rise of a fresh wave of illness in the fall.
Trump said Tuesday that he would still seek their
counsel, regardless of the fate of the task force.
“It is appreciated by the public,” he said of the task force.
Trump said membership in the group would change as the nature of the crisis evolves.
In the Wednesday tweets, Trump said “the task force will continue on indefinitely.” He added that the White House “may add or subtract people to it, as appropriate. The task force will also be very focused on vaccines and therapeutics.”
As Trump pressed the nation to reopen, Dr. Tom Frieden, the former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, testified Wednesday on Capitol Hill that the “war against covid will be long and difficult.”
“We’re just at the beginning of this pandemic and must focus on the future,” he testified, predicting that there will be 100,000 deaths by the end of the month. As bad as the crisis has been, he said, “it’s just the beginning.”
The United States reported more than 20,000 new coronavirus cases and more than 1,800 new deaths Wednesday. The total killed in the United States now stands at more than 74,000 and the total infected at more than 1.2 million.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, whose state has been the hardest hit but has apparently slowed the virus’s spread, said Wednesday that he was confounded to still be seeing hundreds of new infections each day, even as New York residents have been ordered to stay home except for essential trips.
He said he recently asked hospitals what sort of people were now falling ill and was told the majority were older than 51 and had been at home.
“Where are those new cases still coming from?” Cuomo asked. “Because we’ve done everything we can to close down.”
NURSES HONORED
Even as Trump was declaring that much of the task force’s work on securing additional protective equipment was over, he was confronted with a different
perspective at the White House on Wednesday.
Sophia Thomas, president of the American Association of Nurse Practitioners, told Trump in an Oval Office meeting that she had been reusing the same N95 medical mask for weeks, and got a new one only for her visit to the White House.
The exchange happened during an event to recognize National Nurses Day. A reporter asked Luke Adams, whom the White House identified as a “volunteer nurse” from New York state, whether he had sufficient supplies of personal protective equipment. He said yes.
But Thomas then said there were pockets of the country without good protective equipment. She works at the Daughters of Charity Health System in the New Orleans area.
She called the supply of personal protective equipment at her health system “sporadic but manageable.” She said she and her colleagues do what they have to do.
Trump interrupted. “Sporadic for you” but not for a lot of other people, he said. Thomas agreed. Trump insisted that the country is “now loaded up” and added: “I’ve heard we have tremendous supply to almost all places.”
Other nurses in the Oval Office agreed with him.
Later, during an event with Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, Trump pointed to the U.S. topping the world in coronavirus testing, after months of supply shortages hampering the testing program. Des Moines has emerged as a new hot spot in recent days.
Reynolds told Trump that the virus “won’t go away for a while,” and that testing is essential to curtail its spread.
AMERICAN ‘WARRIORS’
Trump has said the nation may have to accept the human cost of returning to normalcy, saying Americans should view themselves as “warriors” combating the virus.
“I’m not saying anything is perfect, and yes, will some people be affected? Yes. Will some people be affected badly? Yes. But we have to get our country open, and we have to get it open soon,” he said Tuesday.
In an interview Wednesday, Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi criticized Trump’s approach. “Death is not an economic motivator, stimulus,” she said. “So why are we going down that path?”
“Everyone’s eager to get out,” she added. “To unlock the lockdown is to test, trace, treat, as well as isolate social distancing.”
Trump on Wednesday defended his decision earlier this week not to wear a face covering when he visited a Honeywell plant in Phoenix that makes them, saying he briefly put one on backstage, out of view of the press, for “not too long” a time.
Trump told reporters in the Oval Office as he signed a proclamation honoring nurses that “I actually did have one. I had a mask on for a period of time.”
He added that he couldn’t “help it” if reporters didn’t see him and that the head of Honeywell had told him that he didn’t need to wear one during the public portions of his visit.
Pelosi suggested Wednesday that Trump’s resistance to wearing a mask is “a vanity thing.”
“Apparently the president has washed his hands of this,” Pelosi said. “The task force is here today, gone tomorrow. No mask.”
On Friday, Vice President Mike Pence is planning to visit Iowa to discuss reopening religious services and maintaining the nation’s food supply.
According to his office, Pence is to meet with faith leaders in Des Moines to discuss safely lifting restrictions on services at houses of worship.
He also plans to visit the headquarters of Hy-Vee, the grocery chain that announced this week that it would impose limits on meat sales because of worker shortages at meatpacking plants.
Last week, Trump signed an executive order compelling meat processors to remain open to address anticipated shortages in the nation’s food supply chain, despite mounting reports about plant worker deaths from covid-19.
HIGH COURT REJECTION
In other news, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to lift Pennsylvania’s shutdown order, rejecting a request from businesses and a political campaign that said their constitutional rights were being violated.
Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, ordered all non-life-sustaining businesses closed in March. The state has since begun easing the restrictions.
The challengers included a golf course, laundromat, timber company, real estate agent and political committee tied to a Republican state legislative candidate. They turned to the nation’s top court after the Pennsylvania Supreme Court rejected their arguments. The case marked the first time the Supreme Court had been asked to lift a coronavirus shutdown order.
There were no noted dissents in the court’s order Wednesday.
Also Wednesday, Republicans in Michigan’s Legislature sued Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer over her decision to extend the state of
emergency there without their approval.
Meanwhile, several mostly Republican-run states across the South and Midwest — including Texas, Georgia, South Carolina, Florida, Ohio and Missouri — continue to take steps to significantly relax restrictions that were put in place against the coronavirus outbreak.
In Colorado, salons have reopened but with a fraction of their normal customers, according to Denver’s 9News.
Georgia has permitted malls to open, but not all stores have done so, and the crowds at some were thin, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. More people seem to be packing parks in the warm weather, Atlanta’s WSB-TV reported.
In other news, a Senate committee is scheduled to hear testimony next week from Fauci, while a House subcommittee hears from Rick Bright, a former top vaccine official removed from his post last month.
Bright, former director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, alleged in a whistleblower complaint Tuesday that he was reassigned to a less prestigious role because he tried to “prioritize science and safety over political expediency” and raised health concerns over a drug that was repeatedly pushed by Trump as a possible coronavirus cure.
Debra Katz, an attorney for Bright, confirmed Wednesday that Bright will appear on Capitol Hill next Thursday at the invitation of Rep. Anna Eshoo, D-Calif., who chairs the health subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
AFFORDABLE CARE ACT
Trump said Wednesday that he will continue trying to toss out all of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, even as some in his administration, including Attorney General William Barr, have privately argued that parts of the law should be preserved during a pandemic.
“We want to terminate health care under Obamacare,” Trump told reporters Wednesday, the last day for his administration to change its position
in a Supreme Court case challenging the law. “Obamacare, we run it really well. … But running it great, it’s still lousy health care.”
While the president has said he will preserve some of the Affordable Care Act’s most popular provisions, including guaranteed coverage for preexisting medical conditions, he has not offered a plan to do so.
Trump’s declaration caps months of debate within his administration about the best course of action, in which the stakes have become greater now that the nation’s health care system is struggling to deal with the spread of the coronavirus.
On Monday, Barr attended a meeting of senior officials in which he argued that the administration should temper its opposition to the Affordable Care Act, leaving some parts of the law intact, according to people familiar with the discussion who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the conversation was private.
Barr and others in the administration have argued that killing the Affordable Care Act completely could be politically damaging to Republicans in an election year, particularly at a time when there is a national health crisis. In two previous cases, the Supreme Court upheld the law, but if the high court were to strike it down, millions of people could find themselves without affordable health care.
The high court plans to hear arguments in the case this year, and a decision may not come until 2021, well after the November election.
Information for this article was contributed by Zeke Miller, Jill Colvin, Darlene Superville and Lisa Mascaro of The Associated Press; by Greg Stohr and Jordan Fabian of Bloomberg News; and by Matt Zapotosky, John Wagner, Quentin Aries, Lateshia Beachum, Abha Bhattarai, Michael Birnbaum, Rachel Lerman, Samantha Pell, Felicia Sonmez, Taylor Telford and Devlin Barrett of The Washington Post.