Day 1,133: Trump taps Pence, who oversaw HIV outbreak in Indiana, to lead ‘Caronavirus’ response
After a horrific response to the global crisis that is the coronavirus, Donald Trump is tripling down.
First, there was the eliminating of federal teams and point-people capable of initiating rapid responses to worldwide health crises.
Then, Trump and his team revealed themselves to be woefully unprepared and ill-informed about the current situation. Their focus was on trying to get Americans to dump money into the stock market that saw the Dow Jones lose more than 1,900 points in two days. They pushed the ‘everything is fine’ narrative while communicating as little as possible about the dangers of the coronavirus.
Now, Trump is still focusing on a short-term economic agenda — for patently political reasons — while lambasting the media for factually covering the potential effects of the coronavirus. Trump further revealed his complete ignorance about the subject on Wednesday by referring to the potential pandemic as “the Caronavirus”.
He also criticized Democrats who want to allocate $8 billion to combat the illness, not the $2.5 billion that Trump has suggested is sufficient.
Then, in a press conference, Trump tapped his VP, Mike Pence, to lead the administration’s heavily delayed response.
The appointment of Pence came after the White House denied it was considering appointing a czar to oversee the administration’s response outbreak.
Trump said Pence would not be a “czar,” but stressed the vice president will be coordinating the efforts.
“Mike will be working with the professionals, doctors and everybody else that is working. The team is brilliant. I spent a lot of time with the team the last couple weeks,” the President said. “But they are brilliant and we’re doing really well and Mike is going to be in charge and Mike will report back to me. But he has a certain talent for this.”
Pence is neither a doctor nor an expert on the subject of healthcare, and his track record in the communicable disease space leaves a lot to be desired. While governor of Indiana, Pence created policies that directly led to an HIV outbreak in the state because he prioritized personal religious beliefs over healthcare.
At the White House, the president touted Pence as an “expert” in public health who has “a certain talent for this,” citing his experience as the governor of Indiana. Public health experts, however, quickly balked at Trump’s praise and immediately recalled Pence’s widely admonished handling of his state’s HIV outbreak in 2016.
During his time as governor, Pence came under fire for resisting the CDC’s urging to allow clean needles to be distributed because of his conservative, religious beliefs. At the time, needle exchanges were illegal in Indiana. But after mounting pressure from health officials and praying on it, the Republican eventually lifted the ban.
Of course, Trump and scientists have a fundamental disagreement about the present risk-level for Americans, as the latter want to warn the public while the former wants to bury everything.
The president has continued to underplay the severity of the outbreak’s threat to the US, again reiterating Wednesday that the risk to Americans is “very low.” However, on Tuesday, CDC officials issued a more dire warning, saying in a press briefing that the virus’s spread in American communities was “inevitable.”
Just when it appears that the Trump administration has hit rock bottom in dealing with a worldwide emergency, they keep falling.
1,133 days in, 329 to go
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