Donald Trump speaks about Coronavirus, White House, Washington, February 26, 2020 (Evan Vucci/AP)
Troubled by a downturn in the stock market, Donald Trump plays down the possibility of Coronavirus affecting the US.
Trump finally made a public statement on the issue on Wednesday, amid bipartisan criticism of a slow Administration response to the virus which has killed almost 3,000 people and infected more than 81,000.
He named Vice President Mike Pence to coordinate the Administration’s response, but played down any concern, “The risk to the American people remains very low. We have the greatest experts, really in the world, right here.”
Trump also assured, “We’ll spend whatever is appropriate” to check the virus.
However, the Administration has slashed funding for disease control since 2018. The global health security team was disbanded, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had to reduce expenditure by 80% as its funding for the global program began to run out. The Complex Crises Fund, a $30 million emergency response pool to deploy disease experts, was closed.
Trump’s budget request this month for the 2020-21 Fiscal Year cuts the CDC budget by almost 16%, and that of the Department of Health and Human Services’s by almost 10%. Cuts of $3 billion in global health programs include a 53% reduction to the World Health Organization and 75% to the Pan American Health Organization.
The US has 60 confirmed cases of Coronavirus, 45 of them Americans who were in Wuhan, China — the epicenter of the outbreak — or on the Diamond Princess cruise ship docked in Japan.
But on Wednesday, the CDC reported that a person with no known risk factors had been infected in Northern California.
“Very Uncertain”
Health care experts alongside Trump were more measured in their assessment of the risks. Dr. Anne Schuchat, the principal deputy director of the CDC, said:
Our aggressive containment strategy here in the United States has been working and is responsible for the low levels of cases that we have so far. However, we do expect more cases.
The trajectory of what we’re looking at over the weeks and months ahead is very uncertain.
Only 30 minutes later, Trump contradicted Schuchat, telling reporters, “I don’t think it’s inevitable….We’re testing everybody that we need to test, and we’re finding very little problem, very little problem.”
Trump has been troubled by the slide in the stock market, which he uses as a benchmark for his supposed success. Amid its worst one-day fall in two years, the S&P 500 has slid more than 6% since Monday.
He accused reporters on Wednesday of making the situation “look as bad as possible”. He has also lashed out at Health Secretary Alex Azar over the decision to bring Americans from the Diamond Princess cruise ship back to the US.
Looking to November’s election, the White House bombarded people with e-mails that Trump is overseeing an “aggressive Coronavirus response” with the “full weight of the US government” working to protect Americans.
Trump supporters went further with conspiracy theories. The radio demagogue Rush Limbaugh spread the claim that Dr. Nancy Messonnier, the director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, is part of the “deep state” trying to overthrow Trump. Limbaugh noted that Messonnier is the sister of Rod Rosenstein, the former Deputy Attorney General frequently chided by Trump during the Trump-Russia investigation.
Messonnier said on Tuesday that “it’s not so much of a question of if [Coronavirus in the US] will happen anymore, but rather more of a question of exactly when this will happen”.
