Tag: Trump coronavirus response

Inside Trump Administration, Debate Raged Over What to Tell Public

The administration’s response to the coronavirus has repeatedly matched public health experts against a hesitant White House, where worry of panic dominates.

New York Times logoWASHINGTON — After weeks of conflicting signals from the Trump administration about the coronavirus, the government’s top health officials decided late last month that when President Trump returned from a trip to India, they would tell him they had to be more blunt about the dangers of the outbreak.

If he approved, they would level with the public.

But Dr. Nancy Messonnier, the director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, got a day ahead of the plan. At noon on Feb. 25, just as Mr. Trump was boarding Air Force One in New Delhi for his flight home, she told reporters on a conference call that life in the United States was about to change. Continue reading.

Trump coronavirus effort undermined by mixed messages and falsehoods

Washington Post logoWhen Anthony Fauci, clad in a white lab coat, invited an “NBC Nightly News” correspondent into his offices this week and described the coronavirus as an “outbreak” that was reaching “likely pandemic proportions,” the immunologist was acting as he long has during public health crises: delivering a fact-based warning to the public.

But at the White House, the more politically minded officials overseeing the administration’s response were irritated that Fauci — the veteran director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases — had used the word “pandemic” without giving anyone on Vice President Pence’s staff a heads-up, according to two people familiar with the situation.

One week after Trump returned home from India to confront an unfolding health crisis and tasked Pence with managing the government-wide response, the effort has been undermined by mixed messages, contradictions and falsehoods — many of them emanating from the president himself, including this week when he repeatedly spread false information about just how soon a coronavirus vaccine would be available. Continue reading.

‘Major surveillance failure’: Former USAID director breaks down why sloppy ‘crisis management’ doomed Trump’s coronavirus response

AlterNet logoThe United States has seen its first two deaths from coronavirus, both of them in Washington State — where, according to an analysis of virus samples, it had been spreading undetected for weeks. Jeremy Konyndyk, who served as director of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) under President Barack Obama, analyzes these troubling developments in a lengthy thread for Twitter. And Konyndyk is highly critical of the Trump Administration’s response to the coronavirus threat in the United States.

Konyndyk begins his thread by noting that coronavirus transmission likely went  “undetected” for “weeks, at least” in “parts of the upper West Coast.” The former USAID director asks, “How did we end up with major surveillance failure on par with Italy and Iran?” — then goes on to explain how.

This development, Konyndyk writes, “may get spun as a technical failure: e.g., flaws in the test kits.” But he quickly adds, “It’s not. It’s an interconnected communications, strategy, process, and execution failure, reflecting a serious breakdown of crisis (management).” Continue reading.