Health officials and scientists working on the Trump administration’s coronavirus response said on Tuesday they are personally offended by the White House’s announcement that it has successfully ended the COVID-19 pandemic—a pandemic that is, in fact, worsening.
In a statement released Tuesday afternoon The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy said that it considered “ending the COVID-19 pandemic” to be one of President Donald Trump’s major first term accomplishments. The office released a corresponding report that listed achievements of the Trump administration in the area of science and innovation.
“It’s mind boggling,” one official said of the White House’s assertion it had ended the pandemic. “There’s no world in which anyone can think that [statement] is true. Maybe the president. But I don’t see how even he can believe that. We have more than 70,000 new cases each day.”
Four officials working with the White House coronavirus task force told The Daily Beast that they viewed the White House’s statement as a personal slight and a public rebuke of their efforts to try and get control of the virus.
In the report released Tuesday, the Office of Science and Technology Policy said that, “From the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Administration has taken decisive actions to engage scientists and health professionals in academic, industry, and government to understand, treat and defeat the disease.” But officials who work with the task force said that the president and his team have often refused to listen to their advice in favor of efforts to reopen the country. For more than seven months, they said, they have tried to convince the American public to take COVID-19 seriously, arguing that the virus would only begin to subside—and death rates slow—if people listened to their warnings to wear masks, keep social distance, and observe quarantine rules.
Officials described the report as the latest example of the president and his team of advisers refusing to acknowledge that the U.S. is experiencing a worrying resurgence of the virus. The document, they added, underscored the extent to which the White House believes there is nothing more than can be done to contain the pandemic. As recently reported by The Daily Beast, Team Trump is now solely focused on cutting the death rate by protecting the most vulnerable, namely those in nursing homes.
“We have exploding case counts. Death rates will undoubtedly rise. They are living in a parallel universe that bears no relation to the reality that Americans are living,” said Dr. Tom Frieden, former director of the Centers for Disease Control in the Obama administration. “And this idea that we should let it spread and protect the vulnerable is a really dangerous mistake. The idea that it [containing the virus] can’t be done ignores reality.”
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