Rift between Trump and Coronavirus Experts Complicate Coronavirus Response

But publicly, there has been a concerted effort to appear that the team and the Oval Office are speaking with one voice.

Redfield disputed on Monday that the health officials were looking to distance themselves from the president.

“I don’t think that’s an accurate characterization,” Redfield said in an interview. He added, ”I think we communicate freely and directly as we see the outbreak as members of the task force.”

On Monday, Trump seemed to walk back from his criticism that Birx was “taking the bait” from Pelosi and said that he had great respect for the doctor.

He suggested his frustration was spurred by his administration not receiving proper credit for testing so many people or for pushing to replenish the stockpile of ventilators early in the crisis.

On Tuesday, he boasted that the US has increased testing capacity by 32,000 percent since March 12 and has “far and away the most testing capacity in the world.”

Trump in early March declared “anybody that needs a test gets a test." Yet, in many parts of the country, it can still take a week or longer for patients to receive test results.

His positive self-evaluation gives short shrift to the fact that the US has the world’s fourth-highest per capita virus death rate, according to Johns Hopkins University’s coronavirus resource center.

In the Axios interview, Trump insisted that the appropriate statistic to judge the virus response is the ratio of deaths to cases.

By that metric, the US ranks 14th among the 20 countries most affected by Covid-19.

Chile, India, Argentina, Russia, South Africa and Bangladesh all have lower rates of deaths to infections, according to the Johns Hopkins-compiled data.

Read also: India’s Top Ministers Hospitalized and Diagnosed with Covid-19

“It’s not a bragging right that over 3 percent in your country that’s infected is dying,” Georgetown University's Gostin said.

Trump’s undercutting of his health advisers makes it all but impossible for the federal government to speak with a single, authoritative voice at a time of national crisis, critics say.

“It’s a very dangerous place for the country to be,” said Kathleen Sebelius, health and human services secretary under President Barack Obama.

“The reason I say it is very dangerous is that we continue to have a White House that has made a public health crisis in this country into a debate about whether people like Donald Trump or not. We have never seen a situation like this before, and we are paying the price.” 

(Writers: Aamer Madhani, Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar, Jonathan Lemire) 

Source: https://apnews.com/a1d3113afef2ac881ecd829c7635edbd