In the meeting in which Trump reportedly called for an estimate, Jared Kushner — now in charge of the wall project on top of other duties like managing a pandemic, finding a COVID-19 vaccine, and ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — was not thrilled. According to the Post, the president’s son-in-law “expressed frustration at this role during the meeting, telling others the wall was not his favorite project but that he is the only one who can get it done.” Hopefully, his ability to handle the administration’s response to the pandemic portends his management of the paint job: This eek, multiple reports depicted how his attempts at running a one-man FEMA led to the federal government’s failure to secure medical supplies for the states.
Trump Has No Fixer To Make COVID-19 Go Away
He’s used to simply hiring people who make his problems disappear. That won’t work with a global pandemic.
The White House/Flickr
Donald Trump said something Friday that should have ended his re-election prospects the moment it left his mouth:
“I feel about vaccines like I feel about tests. This is going to go away without a vaccine, it’s gonna go away, and we’re not going to see it again, hopefully.”
Of course, viruses don’t just “go away” regardless of the amount of propaganda or wishful thinking you throw at them. His theory, however, is telling. Trump’s strategy from the beginning of this crisis has been to minimize the threat and wish it away. His refusal to initiate a comprehensive federal testing-and-contact-tracing program has as much to do with his refusal to acknowledge the seriousness of the pandemic as it does with the Republican laissez-faire approach to public policy.
Still, why would Trump say this? The usual conservative response to a public crisis is that it doesn’t really exist and the free market will magically fix it, anyway. It’s not that the problem will disappear on its own, which is a small child’s response to challenges.
The simple answer is that, ever since he was a young man, Trump has never had to confront any problem that somebody else didn’t just make disappear. Trump has always used an army of attorneys, accountants and corrupted officials to make his problems go away—whether it was with women, creditors, contractors, or law enforcement. Usually, he would have a main consligiere to take on the heaviest burdens, from the detestable Roy Cohn to Michael Cohen to Roger Stone to Rudy Giuliani and, most recently, his own personal Attorney General William Barr. Now that he is president, Trump views the entire federal government as his personal fiefdom to clean up his messes and cover for his open corruption.
But a virus is immune to the protections to which Trump has become accustomed. It does what it does, and Trump finds himself helpless and flummoxed.
There has never been a crisis so big in Trump’s life that he hasn’t been able to use people much more talented and intelligent than himself to make it go away quietly and efficiently. So in Trump’s experience, that’s what problems do: They go away. He has “good genes”; he surrounds himself with “the best people”—willing to cross any moral line for him and bad things just … disappear. All he has to do in the meantime is manage the press with a con man’s combination of razzle dazzle and intimidation. Actual work and accountability are for suckers and lesser people.
Casinos going bankrupt? Take the money and have the accountants stiff the investors. Affairs with porn stars while your wife was pregnant? Have your fixer pay them off. Real estate taxes a problem? Have some employees bribe the assessors. FBI Director threatening to expose your collusion with a hostile foreign power? Fire him by way of a patsy. Tough re-election campaign? Have your lawyer threaten a foreign country if they don’t make up a scandal about your opponent. And so on.
Remarkably, the first three years of Trump’s presidency were relatively smooth sailing outside of self-inflicted crimes and mishaps. His actual approach to life was never fully tested in the Oval Office. Now, with the first real challenge of his presidency, he is utterly adrift.
There is no amount of misdirection or intimidation he can use to make the press stories about all the deaths and economic destruction go away. There is no accountant, lawyer, or public official who can use clever paperwork to make the virus disappear. Solving this problem would require the sort of dedicated attention, tough choices, and hard work that Donald Trump has been able to spend his entire life successfully avoiding while thinking himself clever for doing so.
Trump merely asserts that coronavirus will just fix itself. If you think about it, that actually makes some sense, because every other problem in his Trump’s life has.
The White House/Flickr
Donald Trump said something Friday that should have ended his re-election prospects the moment it left his mouth:
“I feel about vaccines like I feel about tests. This is going to go away without a vaccine, it’s gonna go away, and we’re not going to see it again, hopefully.”
Of course, viruses don’t just “go away” regardless of the amount of propaganda or wishful thinking you throw at them. His theory, however, is telling. Trump’s strategy from the beginning of this crisis has been to minimize the threat and wish it away. His refusal to initiate a comprehensive federal testing-and-contact-tracing program has as much to do with his refusal to acknowledge the seriousness of the pandemic as it does with the Republican laissez-faire approach to public policy.
Still, why would Trump say this? The usual conservative response to a public crisis is that it doesn’t really exist and the free market will magically fix it, anyway. It’s not that the problem will disappear on its own, which is a small child’s response to challenges.
The simple answer is that, ever since he was a young man, Trump has never had to confront any problem that somebody else didn’t just make disappear. Trump has always used an army of attorneys, accountants and corrupted officials to make his problems go away—whether it was with women, creditors, contractors, or law enforcement. Usually, he would have a main consligiere to take on the heaviest burdens, from the detestable Roy Cohn to Michael Cohen to Roger Stone to Rudy Giuliani and, most recently, his own personal Attorney General William Barr. Now that he is president, Trump views the entire federal government as his personal fiefdom to clean up his messes and cover for his open corruption.
But a virus is immune to the protections to which Trump has become accustomed. It does what it does, and Trump finds himself helpless and flummoxed.
There has never been a crisis so big in Trump’s life that he hasn’t been able to use people much more talented and intelligent than himself to make it go away quietly and efficiently. So in Trump’s experience, that’s what problems do: They go away. He has “good genes”; he surrounds himself with “the best people”—willing to cross any moral line for him and bad things just … disappear. All he has to do in the meantime is manage the press with a con man’s combination of razzle dazzle and intimidation. Actual work and accountability are for suckers and lesser people.
Casinos going bankrupt? Take the money and have the accountants stiff the investors. Affairs with porn stars while your wife was pregnant? Have your fixer pay them off. Real estate taxes a problem? Have some employees bribe the assessors. FBI Director threatening to expose your collusion with a hostile foreign power? Fire him by way of a patsy. Tough re-election campaign? Have your lawyer threaten a foreign country if they don’t make up a scandal about your opponent. And so on.
Remarkably, the first three years of Trump’s presidency were relatively smooth sailing outside of self-inflicted crimes and mishaps. His actual approach to life was never fully tested in the Oval Office. Now, with the first real challenge of his presidency, he is utterly adrift.
There is no amount of misdirection or intimidation he can use to make the press stories about all the deaths and economic destruction go away. There is no accountant, lawyer, or public official who can use clever paperwork to make the virus disappear. Solving this problem would require the sort of dedicated attention, tough choices, and hard work that Donald Trump has been able to spend his entire life successfully avoiding while thinking himself clever for doing so.
Trump merely asserts that coronavirus will just fix itself. If you think about it, that actually makes some sense, because every other problem in his Trump’s life has.
Tump’s Order to Paint the Border Wall Black Could Cost $500 Million or More: Report
By Matt Stieb
Last May, President Trump reportedly told administration officials that he wanted the metal slats that make up new sections of the border wall to be painted “flat black” so that they would absorb heat in the summer and become impossible to climb. Never mind that undocumented border crossings tend to decline in the summer due to the oppressive southwestern heat, and officials warned him of the exceptional cost of such a touch: “Once you paint it, you always have to paint it,” one administration official told the Washington Post.
In the meeting in which Trump reportedly called for an estimate, Jared Kushner — now in charge of the wall project on top of other duties like managing a pandemic, finding a COVID-19 vaccine, and ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — was not thrilled. According to the Post, the president’s son-in-law “expressed frustration at this role during the meeting, telling others the wall was not his favorite project but that he is the only one who can get it done.” Hopefully, his ability to handle the administration’s response to the pandemic portends his management of the paint job: This eek, multiple reports depicted how his attempts at running a one-man FEMA led to the federal government’s failure to secure medical supplies for the states.
By Matt Stieb
Last May, President Trump reportedly told administration officials that he wanted the metal slats that make up new sections of the border wall to be painted “flat black” so that they would absorb heat in the summer and become impossible to climb. Never mind that undocumented border crossings tend to decline in the summer due to the oppressive southwestern heat, and officials warned him of the exceptional cost of such a touch: “Once you paint it, you always have to paint it,” one administration official told the Washington Post.
Other far-fetched and cruel ideas that Trump reportedly proposed, like shooting migrants in the legs and building a moat, have fallen by the wayside, but the president still wants to paint the border wall black. According to a new report from the Washington Post, in a meeting in April — a month in which almost 60,000 Americans died in the coronavirus pandemic — Trump told senior adviser Jared Kushner to seek out estimates for the paint job. The Post also obtained a copy of the estimates that federal contractors drew up, showing costs ranging from $500 million for two coats of acrylic paint to over $3 billion for “powder coating.”
Either cost would be an egregious waste of taxpayer dollars, not to mention the wall budget. The White House has allocated $15 billion for the border wall, two-thirds of which comes from the Defense Department budget for construction; if the administration considers something closer to the high-end estimate, that could eat up as much as a fifth of the total funds obtained for the barrier, even though the project is less than half finished. Though the president hopes to build 500 miles of the wall by early next year, only 175 new miles have been built throughout his entire administration.
One official with knowledge of the plans told the Post that the administration doesn’t have a policy for the obvious challenge of painting the slats already in place on the Mexican side of the wall. And a materials engineer, Rick Duncan, who spoke with the paper said that Trump’s black wall would only increase the steel barrier’s ability to retain heat by less than 10 percent. “There’s no technical reason to paint it to make it hotter,” Duncan said, adding that the intense sun on the border would cause the paint to lose its ability to absorb heat. He estimated that sections in the Sonoran desert would need to be repainted every ten years, adding to the substantial cost of a project that has no use aside from appeasing the president, who may have thought of the idea because one of his friends touched a hot surface once:
TRUMP KNEW ABOUT THE PANDEMIC BUT SAW IT ONLY AS ANOTHER OPPORTUNITY TO HAND WALL STREET AND THE RICH TRILLIONS IN WELFARE SOCIALISM.
“So, in a sense, everything was set to go. As you know, just a week before the inauguration in 2017, the Obama people who had been doing this planning got together with the incoming Trump people, their counterparts, and conducted this major simulation that demonstrated the weaknesses that still existed. And then, of course, president Trump proceeded to disband, dismantle, or defund most of the networks that had been set up in the previous two administrations and to ignore all of the reports and warnings that were produced in his administration, as well.”
“So, in a sense, everything was set to go. As you know, just a week before the inauguration in 2017, the Obama people who had been doing this planning got together with the incoming Trump people, their counterparts, and conducted this major simulation that demonstrated the weaknesses that still existed. And then, of course, president Trump proceeded to disband, dismantle, or defund most of the networks that had been set up in the previous two administrations and to ignore all of the reports and warnings that were produced in his administration, as well.”
Why Humanity Will Probably Botch the Next Pandemic, Too
We won’t learn much from this, Mike Davis fears. Photo: John Moore/Getty Images
We won’t learn much from this, Mike Davis fears. Photo: John Moore/Getty Images
Mike Davis tried to warn us. Fifteen years ago, America’s favorite Marxist truck driver turned MacArthur Fellow published The Monster At Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu. In it, Davis argued that a global pandemic was not merely imminent but late: When you pack tens of millions of human beings into unprecedentedly dense, often unsanitary cities — then surround those cities with factory farms teeming with historically vast concentrations of pigs and chickens — you get a more fertile breeding ground for emergent disease than any our species has ever seen. Add in southern China’s diverse wildlife population, wet markets, and lung-impairing air pollution — and a global economic system that tosses millions of humans across continents on a daily basis — and the mystery wasn’t whether a novel virus would emerge in China and then take the world by storm but why one hadn’t already done so. Davis implored humanity to capitalize on its good fortune while it still could. A lethal strain of avian flu had already become endemic in East Asian birdlife. But there was still time to build up the emaciated health-care systems of the developing world, subordinate competitive nationalisms to global cooperation on public health, scale back hazardous agribusiness practices, and wrest control of antiviral and vaccine production from Big Pharma’s grubby hands.
None of that happened, of course. And in 2020, Davis’s prophesied “monster” (or, at least, one its relatives) finally ran through our door, ransacked our house, and killed many of our loved ones.
Intelligencer spoke with Davis this week about what must be done to combat the COVID-19 pandemic and all the other monsters still to come. Maybe this time, we’ll listen (or, failing that, maybe a few of us will check out his new book, Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties, which has nothing to do with coronaviruses but is surely worth reading anyway).
As one of the small minority of humans who’d been anticipating a global pandemic for decades, has anything surprised you about the one we actually got or America’s response to it thus far?
The virus has some very unusual qualities. But apart from that, it fits perfectly into the template that’s been created over the last generation. In 2005, the Bush administration issued a national strategy for pandemic influenza. The World Health Organization (WHO), that same year, updated its rules for how all member-governments are to respond to a pandemic. We’ve been preparing for this for longer than my teenage children have been alive. And the Obama administration, particularly after it was confronted with Ebola, put a lot more investment into pandemic prevention and expanded international surveillance.
So, in a sense, everything was set to go. As you know, just a week before the inauguration in 2017, the Obama people who had been doing this planning got together with the incoming Trump people, their counterparts, and conducted this major simulation that demonstrated the weaknesses that still existed. And then, of course, president Trump proceeded to disband, dismantle, or defund most of the networks that had been set up in the previous two administrations and to ignore all of the reports and warnings that were produced in his administration, as well.
Given the resilient weaknesses that Obama’s team identified and the manifold deficiencies in America’s systems of public health and medical provision, how confident are you that a Democratic administration could have averted a catastrophe like this one?
Most epidemiologists believe that we live in an age of pandemics. Of course, avian flu, including its new variety, the H7 variety, is just as dangerous as coronavirus. And according to the WHO, an outbreak is imminent. But the difference in the Obama administration would have been, first of all, we would have had a better early-warning system. Just last year, Trump defunded a CDC-related program that monitors viruses present in wild and domestic animals that could possibly cross over to humans. That program was allied with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which is the world’s leading expert in animal-to-human coronaviruses.
So that would have been in place. And if Obama had received the warnings about critical shortages in personal protective gear and ventilators that Trump had, and if he had stocked the strategic stockpile, then I think our experience of this may have been closer to Germany’s. And we may have avoided a catastrophic economic shutdown or at least gotten by with a much shorter one.
Having said all that, in this country, the pandemic has taken root in a medical environment characterized by continuous disinvestment, particularly at the county and state levels. There are 60,000 fewer employees in public-health departments than there were before 2008. So many [Great Recession–era] cutbacks haven’t been undone. Meanwhile, since the election of Ronald Reagan, we’ve been converting hospitals into financial systems running on just-in-time inventory and keeping as few beds as possible.
Nursing homes are a similar story. They’ve become a big industry dominated by private-equity firms, which extract the highest profits they can out of the lowest costs. And from the very beginning of the outbreak at the Life Care Center in Kirkland, Washington, it was clear that nursing homes were going to turn into mortuaries. James Straub, who’s the union representative for that nursing home, was telling me in March, “Look, the public-health people are not on top of this.” You know, everybody thinks Washington is the most progressive state in the world. But not on these issues. The homes are very poorly regulated. And when the public-health officials went to collect the first bodies, they didn’t bother to interview the nursing-home workers. These workers had no protective gear at all. They had minimal to no training in infection control. The officials didn’t bother to interview them. These nursing-assistant jobs pay $10 an hour. The only way people can make ends meet is to moonlight. So a large minority of people who work in nursing homes also work at least part time in another nursing home. So you have this transmission belt that links all the nursing homes together in a given region. James told me in March, watch what happens in nursing homes — thousands of people are going to die. Well, 12,000 have died in them by the latest count (and that’s absolutely an undercount).
The criminal abdication of federal responsibility is implicated in this. From the very beginning, they should have known that thousands of people were going to die in these nursing homes. There should have been federal rescue efforts.
The coronavirus crisis has triggered a lot of critical discussion about the hazards posed by East Asian “wet markets” and the consumption of “bushmeat” in West Africa. Your book suggests that while these are indeed risky practices, they are also the products of broader pathologies in global capitalism. What are those pathologies, and how must we redress them if we wish to start feeding ourselves in a manner that isn’t so conducive to pandemic disease?
I don’t think there’s much disagreement that the transmission of wild-animal diseases to humans has greatly accelerated. And it’s being accelerated by three things. One is the clearance of tropical forests for livestock grazing. The second is the multinational logging companies, and the third has been the problem of high food prices that has driven people away from traditional sources of protein and towards consuming — in ever-increasing numbers — the flesh of wild species.
When I wrote the book in 2005, the study that really kind of knocked my socks off was an article that showed the interrelationship between factory fleets and overfishing in the Gulf of Guinea. Traditionally, coastal West Africans have relied on fish protein. Every little village strung out on the coast was a fishing village, and they were the ones feeding the broader population. But some time in the 1970s or 1980s, factory fishing fleets came into the Gulf of Guinea and basically vacuumed out half the fish biomass. And a lot of it went for animal feed, not human consumption.
This was disastrous for coastal fishermen. And it raised fish prices in the cities. At the same time, other multinationals were conducting immense logging operations in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Gabon, and Cameroon. And their work crews required, of course, high-protein, high-calorie diets to perform hard labor. So they started living off of so-called bushmeat. It’s been shown that no less than 70 mammal, reptile, and bird species entered the diet. Well, since this coincided with rising prices of fish protein, the city markets started attracting bushmeat. And what had started off as just little, ancillary operations for logging companies soon became a kind of big business in itself. So people were consuming all kinds of meat that was basically unfamiliar and only entered the diet because it was so cheap. So that’s the political ecology that sponsored the emergence of HIV and Ebola.
There are obviously other factors. The prominence of exotic wild animals, including bats, in the diets of South China and in Chinese traditional medicine. The so-called “wet markets” where they’re sold. That’s obviously a huge problem. But it’s a much easier one to deal with than the political ecology that I’ve sketched out for West Africa. Similarly, the Amazon is always a possible source of emergence. Which makes opposing rainforest destruction something other than just tree-hugging. The rainforest isolates us from wild animals that originate epidemic disease.
And then there’s obviously the industrialization of poultry and livestock production. Enormous poultry plants were directly implicated in the spread of avian flu in China and Southeast Asia. And that’s a problem everywhere. There’s also the overuse of antibiotics in these huge livestock concentrations. I remember once being in Western Utah. And the horizon was just flattened sagebrush, but this awful smell hung over it. And I got closer, and it was this infamous plant in Western Utah that processes a hundred thousand pigs a year. And of course, larger poultry plants process as many as a million.
A final factor is poverty itself. Malnutrition, the absence of clean water, fecal contamination of household environments, coexisting infections (24 million people in sub-Saharan Africa have HIV) — all this combines to create a separate immunological humanity. In the United States and Western Europe, maybe 20 or 25 percent of the population has immune systems that are compromised, simply by age or some preexisting respiratory condition, diabetes, whatever. But if you go to parts of Africa or the slums of the world, that’s kind of turned upside down. You might find 70 percent of the population whose immune systems are greatly compromised.
You’ve written about the horrific consequences that the 1918 “Spanish flu” had for the people of India and how their suffering has been obscured in the West’s historical memory of that pandemic. What does India’s experience in 1918 tell us about the perils facing the developing world in 2020 and what must be done to mitigate those perils?
Most histories of the Spanish flu, including John Barry’s [The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History], concentrate almost entirely on the United States, Western Europe, and then a few sensational examples in the Pacific. But somewhere between 60 percent and two-thirds of the people who died, died in Western India. This was a situation where the British requisitioned grain from India on a huge scale to support their war effort. And this requisition coincided with a drought. Food prices started to go sky-high, and a famine ensued. So when the Spanish flu hit Western India, it encountered a population that was gravely malnourished, some on the verge of starvation. And people died like flies.
That’s a warning to us today. Right now, if you’re in Kenya, the cartons of medical supplies that used to come stamped with “To the people of Kenya, from the people of the United States,” now say, “To the people of Kenya, from the people of China.” Trump has made “America first” mean Africa last or the global poor last. There’s an enormous need to scale up what is now a flagging effort, mainly from the European countries, to address the pandemic in Africa. In some countries, what is even more important than medical aid is debt relief. I think there are about 30 African countries that spend a larger part of their budgets on paying off loans they contracted in the 1980s and 1990s than they do on their public health systems. In so many countries, we simply have no idea what’s happening because there’s so few test kits.
Finally, the World Health Organization, whose role is to be the coordinator of combined international efforts, has been completely sidelined. From the very beginning, nobody did what they had promised to do. The most extraordinary case is actually in Europe. The European Union has a long-standing convention and emergency bureau to coordinate joint action during disasters, including cross-border disease. The Italians begged for the implementation of this, which would have mandated the sharing of national stockpiles of medical equipment and the sending of doctors. It was all supposed to operate through this disaster emergency body that was created. And every member of the E.U. — without exception — refused. And that shadows the future of the E.U. It would not be at all surprising if Italy decides in the next year to leave like Britain did.
Your book indicts the Chinese government’s handling of various influenza outbreaks in the early years of this century. Both Donald Trump and Joe Biden have accused the Chinese government of suppressing information about the novel coronavirus. Do you think the Xi Jinping government deserves as much blame for this crisis as American political leaders have ascribed to it?
Initially, I joined the chorus of people condemning China. And it’s certainly the case that within Wuhan and Hubai, there was great repression, even violence against the whistleblowers and an effort to cover up the extent of the outbreak, including possibly covering it up from Beijing. So that’s all true. But as far as the allegation that Beijing did not inform the international community in a timely manner, this seems to be an entirely different story. China detected the first unusual pneumonia outbreaks at the beginning of December. They announced that an unknown virus was responsible in a little more than a week. They sequenced the whole genome of the virus. The WHO was informed about this almost immediately. Trump doesn’t seem to understand the number of Americans who work for the WHO and who were in almost instant contact.
The “smoking gun” that’s usually brought in evidence against the Chinese was a false social-media message that denied the existence of human-to-human spread. But the Chinese government immediately followed that with an official statement that said yes, there is human-to-human spread. So I’m very confused about that. I don’t see the evidence that the Chinese scientific community or the WHO covered that up. The problem, in January through early February was that nobody seemed to believe that this could be as bad as it was. Fauci, in the beginning, was saying this posed a very low risk to the United States.
But by playing the “yellow fear,” Trump is destroying the alliance — the medical and scientific alliance — that is absolutely most important, and that’s the cooperation between the scientific communities of the United States and China. That’s where most of the cutting-edge research is going to be done. And the research community has probably broken all records for cooperation since the pandemic began. People are publishing and providing information that ordinarily would be proprietary. That’s been a silver lining in all of this.
Speaking of proprietary research, why do you believe that the way we fund pharmaceutical development — principally, through the granting of patent monopolies to private-sector firms — is inadequate to the needs of pandemic prevention and mitigation?
The reasons for this are pointed out very eloquently in a report from Trump’s own Council of Economic Advisers. The report pointed out that a drug company has no incentive to manufacture something that will only be used once, when it could invest in other areas that offer constant profits over many years, such as medication for heart disease or sexual dysfunction in elderly males like myself.
If you look at the big picture of how vaccines are developed, most of the key research that gets capitalized for private profit is actually produced on the public’s dime. Either in public universities, or private universities where the research is federally funded; maybe some of the faculty will spin off a little biotech company with an intense emphasis on research and development. Meanwhile, Big Pharma are basically a bunch of rent collectors who spend much more money on advertising than they do on R&D. On the whole, they’re interested in patents. And this became a huge battle during the second avian-flu outbreak in 2003, 2004, because there’s an antiviral that’s been very successful in preventing avian-flu cases from becoming critical called Tamiflu. And India wanted to manufacture it generically. So the Indian government asked the World Health Organization to support them. This was when it looked like the avian-flu outbreak might become pandemic in a matter of weeks.
And the WHO — which is forced to seek 80 percent of its budget from philanthropic organizations like the Gates Foundation, from the most powerful states but also from pharmaceutical companies — decided not to endorse this position. And in exchange for keeping its mouth shut about generic production, Big Pharma provided the WHO with a stockpile of Tamilfu large enough to last about two or three weeks.
Four of the big pharmaceutical companies are doing vaccines at the moment. But the real research isn’t being done by them. It’s being done by small and medium-size firms whose work the big companies will then buy. So Big Pharma is basically a rent-collection agency based on holding patents and the exercise of immense political lobbying. It is unnecessary in this whole chain of innovation and production. I much admire Elizabeth Warren for having submitted a bill for the public production of prescription drugs. I think that’s what progressive in the U.S. should demand. I don’t mean nationalization, because the smaller and medium-sized companies that do provide and develop new drugs should be kept in the loop. But there’s no reason for Big Pharma anymore. It’s become a fetter on the translation of a genuine revolution in biotechnology into public health in this country and around the world.
As you argued in 2005, a global pandemic of some kind was all but inevitable. The novel coronavirus is a terrible scourge. But it is much less lethal than some of the avian-influenza strains that have come within a few mutations of achieving human-to-human transmissibility. Given this, one might see a silver lining in the fact that the first major pandemic of the 21st century poses relatively little risk to children. We will still pay a horrific toll for our governments’ myopia and negligence. But at least we will emerge from this having finally learned our lesson. And when the next, potentially more lethal bug hops the species barrier, we will be prepared. Do you find solace in such reasoning?
Let me start with an analogy. Let’s take the case of wildfires and earthquakes, which I write about a lot, at least insofar as they affect California. In both those cases, the learning curve is either flat or negative. There may be some slight reform that comes out of it. But at the end of the day, we repeat the same bad policies. We keep doing the same things that made people vulnerable to the previous fire or to the previous earthquake. And that’s because of the huge inertia built into the system. Right now, in San Diego County where I live, we’ve had two of the largest wildfires of the 21st century. And there’s 100,000 homes in development in high- or critical-fire-risk areas.
The last great earthquake of the 1990s led to only minor improvements in structural safety. So there are these inertial interests that oppose lesson learning and reform on a serious scale. Now, the record with epidemic disease is mixed. But go back to SARS. SARS initially created a greater scare than the avian flu had. One guy got it at an airport hotel. Everyone he came in contact with got infected, and within 24 hours this thing had appeared in five different countries. So there was research done. There were two candidate vaccines developed for SARS. But there was no money to take them any further. And so these vaccines sat in refrigerators. There was no profit to be had from them. Those vaccines might confer cross-immunity to the current coronavirus. But we’ll never know.
And that’s what tends to happen: When world trade or the lives of people in rich countries is threatened, you see this huge flurry of activity. But once the threat declines, the money or funding disappears.
We’ve disinvested in public health. The private sector has been unable to develop the lifeline medicines that we need. In terms of international coordination, I don’t think the WHO is going to exist in the present form a year from now, not after the withdrawal of American support.
During the Cold War, both the United States and the Soviet Union put a lot of effort into world public health as part of their respective efforts to influence nonaligned countries (ex-colonial countries). So the U.S. launched its famous malaria campaign, and the Soviet Union, in 1958, launched the campaign that eventually rendered smallpox extinct. After the Cold War ended, there was no geopolitical or foreign-policy reason to pay that much attention to public health in the poorer part of the world. Now who’s going to rebuild an international infrastructure to raise the capacities of poorer countries to detect and respond to diseases? To ensure that the stockpiles are adequate to meet the challenge anywhere on the globe? I don’t see anybody doing that.
The United States has abdicated. China is very equivocal about this. Although they are now the first responder in 18 or 20 countries, they’ve been very equivocal about investment. They never put that much into the World Health Organization. They never stepped into America’s shoes. Will they now? That’s totally unclear. Because nationalism is everywhere. And it’s defeated international public-health cooperation in this outbreak. So we’re going to be left with a research community that is more spirited and international and willing to cooperate with each other than at any time in history, but with governments that have turned their backs on all the post-World War II institutions [of global cooperation]. Except for the World Bank and IMF, of course. And it’s the World Bank whose structural-adjustment programs destroyed health systems throughout the debtor world in the 1980s and 1990s.
So out of this mist, can you find a silver lining? Is there any indication that the destruction of tropical rainforests will stop? That we will stop eating the beef that destroys the forests that protect us from emergent viruses? That we will end factory farming on its present scale? That we will invest a trillion dollars to provide potable water and sanitation to everybody on Earth?
No, of course not. None of this will happen.
The voices demanding for it to happen will grow louder. But I haven’t seen a lot of international solidarity in this country, even amongst the left. You know, I’m a Sanders supporter, 110%. But I can’t recall him ever talking about issues of international inequality, health, debt, or any of it. The left, in a way, is following its own version of “America first.” And the philanthropic and religious organizations that have played a vital role can’t deal with the scale of the challenges ahead. They represent an old form of philanthropic internationalism that’s everywhere on the wane and everywhere being defunded. So I guess we’ll have to rely on Bill Gates being Superman and going into a phone booth, putting on his cape, and saving the health of 8 billion people.
The silver linings are all in terms of the possibilities that exist to accelerate this biotech revolution. And the prospects for that are incredible. But I can’t see any way they get translated into public health for everybody. I mean, the battles that will occur over the distribution of the COVID-19 vaccine are going to be — suffice to say, if there is a vaccine, the White House is not going to be pushing for it to be distributed equally to all countries in need
Top aide told Trump in January coronavirus would be his 'largest national security crisis': Report
| April 29, 2020 01:54 PM
National security adviser Robert O'Brien sounded an early alarm when he told President Trump in January that the coronavirus would be “the largest national security crisis" of his presidency.
| April 29, 2020 01:54 PM
National security adviser Robert O'Brien sounded an early alarm when he told President Trump in January that the coronavirus would be “the largest national security crisis" of his presidency.
O'Brien advised Trump at the time to take quick action by restricting travel from China and sought to convince his European counterpart to do likewise, according to a new Wall Street Journal report.
White House officials were told to view O'Brien's top aide, Matthew Pottinger, a former Marine and Wall Street Journal reporter who covered the SARS outbreak in China and who expressed concern about the virus early on, as the voice of the National Security Council on issues relating to COVID-19.
Fearing he could spread the virus, Pottinger even wore a mask in front of Trump before the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidance to do so.
O'Brien, who joined the White House coronavirus task force in late January, also pressed for the addition of Dr. Deborah Birx to the response effort.
Birx joined as a coordinator on Feb. 26 as Vice President Mike Pence was appointed to lead the group.
Like Birx, O'Brien joined the White House from the State Department, where he was the administration’s special envoy for hostage affairs.
At the Security Council, he advised that the White House should maintain focus on competition with China, a view shared by Trump's Director of Trade and Manufacturing Policy Peter Navarro, who has accused China of "profiteering" during the pandemic.
Trump May Already Be Discrediting a
COVID-19 Vaccination
He’s systematically destroying Americans’ last reserves of trust in government.
He’s systematically destroying Americans’ last reserves of trust in government.
May 2, 2020
Hopes are rapidly rising for a COVID-19 vaccine. The World Health Organization recently announced that as many as 102 potential candidates are currently under development—eight of them already in clinical trials. President Donald Trump has called for his own ambitious vaccine research program, dubbed “Operation Warp Speed,” with the goal of finding a cure by year-end. If all goes well, a vaccine could be available en masse by January, according to Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top epidemiologist and a key member of the White House coronavirus task force.
These developments are good news. As United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said this week, only a vaccine can return the world to “normalcy,” while all other measures, such as universal testing, will only mitigate the spread of the infectious disease.
But if and when a vaccine is available, will Americans actually give it their trust?
Under any circumstances, there would be some skepticism. Even reasonable citizens might show some caution in embracing new and relatively unproven therapies. This skepticism, however, could take on epic proportions under Trump’s leadership. The president’s near-constant stream of lies, misinformation, obfuscations, and half-truths has systematically destroyed Americans’ last reserves of trust in government. A logical consequence of this behavior is that many Americans will end up wary of a cure produced by the administration, even with rock-solid proof of its efficacy.
This could be catastrophic. Public reluctance to accept a vaccine will mean continued suffering, despite a treatment in hand, and an even slower road back toregular life. As much as Trump would like to believe that a vaccine would be gratefully embraced by all Americans—no doubt a catalyst for his urgency in pursuing one—Trump himself has made that outcome less likely.
Even in the best of situations, persuading Americans to get their shots isn’t easy. Fewer than half of Americans get their flu shots every year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. During the H1N1 pandemic of 2009-2010, only 27 percent of Americans were ever vaccinated, despite relatively high-profile public health campaigns and the availability of free vaccinations to anyone who wanted one. As a result, H1N1 continues to sicken and kill Americans every year—albeit at rates far, far below that of COVID-19.
Scholarly analyses of the public’s response to the H1N1 vaccine find a correlation—even if it’s a relatively small one—between general levels of public trust in government and vaccination rates. Much more significant in influencing vaccination ratesis the quality and consistency of official communications from government officials. More than anything, that’s what enables citizens to accept official advice and trust in a treatment’s safety. “Individuals and institutions are trusted when the public perceives that they are knowledgeable and expert, they are open and honest, and concerned and caring,” as one study found. All of these are standards that the president and his administration have repeatedly failed to clear.
Trump himself has been a font of misinformation and conflicting advice. He boosted the anti-malaria drug chloroquine (now shown to be both ineffective and deadly) and made utterly unsupported claims that the virus will “go away” with the summer heat. Then, he suggested that injecting oneself with disinfectants could be a treatment for COVID-19, a proposal met with horror from public health experts—and a stern warning from the makers of Lysol.
The president has also failed to be “open and honest.” He has undermined the credibility of public health officials and governors in whom Americans put more faith. More than once, his false statements have forced his top public health officials to issue “clarifications” that contradict his own baseless claims. At the same time, Trump has encouraged resistance against the restrictions imposed by his own administration, such as through his pointed refusal to wear a face mask in defiance of CDC guidance.
Trump has also failed to convey any sense of empathy for the people hardest-hitby the ravages of the virus’s outbreak. According to an analysis by the Washington Post, Trump has spent just four and a half minutes expressing condolences for the pandemic’s victims while spending 45 minutes praising himself over more than 13 hours of airtime during a three-week period.
Even “Operation Warp Speed,” Trump’s push for a vaccine, smacks of political expediency more than a genuine concern to save lives. According to the New York Times, Trump has repeatedly urged a faster timetable, despite consistent warnings from public health experts of the risks of rushing through the process.
These fears are certainly justified, given the administration’s record of missteps in its pandemic response. For instance, flawed coronavirus test kits ordered by the CDC set back the nation’s testing capacity by weeks in the early onset of the crisis. The FDA’s rush to approve antibody test kits has now led to a flood of inaccurate or outright fraudulent tests on the market.
It’s no surprise, then, that Americans feel awash in misinformation and conflicting guidance. A new survey from the Pew Research Center finds that about half of respondents say they find it difficult to sort fact from fiction in their daily news consumption. Nearly two-thirds of Americans say they’ve seen some news “that seemed completely made up.”
This confusion makes the public a ripe target for anti-vaccine misinformation campaigns, which the Associated Press recently reported are already in high gear. “I don’t want the government forcing it on my community or my family,” activist Rita Palma told the AP. In addition to sowing doubts about the effectiveness of a potential vaccine, these groups are organizing resistance against the possibility of mandating its usage, a headache that governments will be forced to confront.
The consequence of all of these failures is a public that is rightfully suspicious of the Trump administration’s motives and competence as it joins the race for a cure. Recent polls find that only 23 percent say they trust Trump’s information “a great deal.” Fewer than half would follow his recommendations. Even most Republicans now say they don’t put much stock in Trump’s pronouncements. All told, these circumstances are hardly a recipe for a successful vaccination campaign, even if government scientists were to beat the odds and meet the administration’s ambitious year-end deadline.
In the meantime, the damage Trump has done to public trust has weakened efforts to mitigate the virus. Public officials still need Americans to maintain the discipline of social distancing, reject deadly misinformation, and comply with guidance on wearing masks, especially as “quarantine fatigue” sets in and hardens. They will need people to get themselves tested regularly and adhere to quarantines if contact tracing shows they’ve been exposed to someone infected. But as images of crowded beaches and mask-less protesters show, rebellion is already brewing and may only get worse.
Granted, public trust in government has long been in decline. But Trump’s appalling pandemic response could be the ultimate deathblow. As much as Trump wants to reap the political rewards of unleashing a cure this election year, he is sabotaging his prospects by destroying the public trust needed to bring the pandemic under control. What he’ll leave behind instead is one more disaster for his eventual successor to repair.
Obama blasts Trump's handling of coronavirus pandemic as 'an absolute chaotic disaster' and blames the president for America being more 'selfish, tribal, and divided' in leaked call
- Former president hit out at Trump in web talk to ex-administration officials
- Obama said administration's response to pandemic is 'spotty and anemic'
- Former president also blamed Trump for exacerbating 'tribal' strife in country
- Comments were sharpest attack by Obama aimed at President Trump
- Trump defended performance during pandemic despite nearly 78,000 dead
- President has claimed his travel ban on China saved millions of lives
- Here’s how to help people impacted by Covid-19
The Trump administration’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been an ‘absolute chaotic disaster,’ former President Barack Obama said on Friday.
President Trump’s predecessor blamed the current occupant of the Oval Office and his allies for exacerbating ‘tribal’ tensions around the country, which he says has hampered the effort to reduce total number of cases nationwide.
Audio of the web call in which Obama spoke was obtained by Yahoo News.
‘What we’re fighting against is these long-term trends in which being selfish, being tribal, being divided, and seeing others as an enemy - that has become a stronger impulse in American life,’ the president said.
‘And by the way, we’re seeing that internationally as well.
‘It’s part of the reason why the response to this global crisis has been so anemic and spotty.
Former President Barack Obama (left) blasted President Trump's (right) handling of the COVID-19 pandemic as an 'absolute chaotic disaster'
‘It would have been bad even with the best of governments.
‘It has been an absolute chaotic disaster when that mindset - of “what’s in it for me” and “to heck with everybody else” - when that mindset is operationalized in our government.’
Obama added: ‘That’s why, I, by the way, am going to be spending as much time as necessary and campaigning as hard as I can for Joe Biden.’
There's currently more than 1.3 million cases of coronavirus and 78,000 deaths in the U.S.
Save for campaign speeches during the 2018 mid-term elections, the former president has largely been quiet since Trump took office and replaced him after defeating Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Obama’s comments on the Trump administration’s handling of the pandemic were a much sharper attack on his successor.
Last month, Obama offered veiled criticism of Trump over the COVID-19 crisis, claiming that there was no ‘coherent national plan’ to address the outbreak.
'While we continue to wait for a coherent national plan to navigate this pandemic, states like Massachusetts are beginning to adopt their own public health plans to combat this virus––before it's too late,' the former president tweeted.
Obama used the tweet to issue an attack on the president, but also praised Massachusetts for its response to the pandemic with a New Yorker article titled: It's Not Too Late to Go on Offense Against the Coronavirus.
As several states continue to lament that they do not have the supplies to administer enough testing, some have taken matters into their own hands.
On April 22, Obama launched a veiled attack on Trump without using the president's name, claiming there is no 'coherent national plan' on coronavirus response
Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker launched a plan for full-scale, statewide testing, which will be used to implement effective quarantine and treatment systems.
The state was able to increase the number of tests administered from just 41 on March 9 to more than eight thousand by April 17.
Obama also attacked his successor at the end of March as Trump signed the CARES Act to provide $2.2 trillion in economic stimulus and relief for Americans and small businesses.
'We've seen all too terribly the consequences of those who denied warnings of a pandemic,' the two-term Democrat tweeted last month.
Obama also praised Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker's (left) response to the virus, and in his tweet linked to an article about the state dramatically increasing its testing capabilities
'We can't afford any more consequences of climate denial. All of us, especially young people, have to demand better of our government at every level and vote this fall,' he continued at the time.
This election year has been upended by the pandemic. With no vaccine in sight and the number of cases climbing, some states have started to gradually reopen their economies while others have maintained a lockdown.
The Trump administration has been scrutinized for its response to the pandemic.
Reports in several media outlets indicated that Trump played down the severity of the coronavirus even while his own experts were urging him to take it seriously.
Top Trump administration officials like Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar and trade adviser Peter Navarro reportedly sounded the alarm about a pandemic reaching American shores as early as late January, but the president failed to heed the warnings.
Critics said the valuable time that was lost could have been used to ramp up testing as well as provide medical professionals adequate supplies of personal protective equipment in order to better deal with the pandemic.
Trump has also been criticized for mixed messaging - touting social distancing and preventative measures on the one hand but then urging his supporters to 'liberate' states through mass demonstrations on the other.
The president has also made comments that have prompted mockery and scorn from the public, including his suggestion that cleaning disinfectants could be ingested into the body in order to treat COVID-19.
Trump, for his part, has claimed that his decision to shut down travel from China saved lives, though the administration has allowed flights from China carrying American citizens and legal residents to continue landing in the country.
Workers at Island Harvest Food Bank working in conjunction with the Nourish New York initiative distribute locally produced goods to people in need of food assistance in Massapequa, New York, on Friday
The record unemployment rate reported on Friday captured the pain of a nation where tens of millions of jobs suddenly vanished, devastating the economy and forcing Trump to overcome historic headwinds to win a second term.
Just a few short months ago, Trump planned to campaign for re-election on the back of a robust economy.
That's a distant memory after more than 20 million jobs were lost in April, leading to an unemployment rate of 14.7 per cent, the highest since the Great Depression.
There's no parallel in US history for the suddenness or severity of the economic collapse, which is ravaging some states that are crucial to Trump's victory.
The president is now tasked with convincing voters that the catastrophic jobs losses were the result of the pandemic - not his management of the public health crisis.
He also argues that he deserves another chance to rebuild what the virus destroyed.
‘What I can do: I’ll bring it back,’ Trump told Fox News on Friday.
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‘It’s fully expected. There’s no surprise. Everybody knows that.
‘Even the Democrats aren´t blaming me for that.’
Bringing back jobs quickly won't be easy.
Backdated statistics show that unemployment reached as high as 25 per cent in 1933 during the Great Depression.
A broader calculation of unemployment from April's jobs report suggests the rate might be nearly that high now, as the 14.7 per cent rate doesn't include people who left the labor force or still consider themselves employed despite not working.
But the efforts needed to contain the spread of the coronavirus have caused much more rapid job loss than during the 1930s.
Decision to bury CDC reopening America report 'came from the highest levels of the White House', who then ordered parts of it be fast-tracked for approval after report emerged it had been shelved
The decision to shelve detailed advice from the nation's top disease control experts for reopening communities during the coronavirus pandemic came from the highest levels of the White House, according to internal government emails obtained by The Associated Press.
Experts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention spent weeks working on a report titled 'Guidance for Implementing the Opening Up America Again Framework', which was researched and written to help faith leaders, business owners, educators and state and local officials as they begin to reopen.
The report included detailed 'decision trees,' or flow charts aimed at helping people determine whether they should reopen their places of business or continue to keep them closed.
Experts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention spent weeks working on a report titled 'Guidance for Implementing the Opening Up America Again Framework'. Emails obtained by The Associated Press show CDC Director Robert Redfield (right) signed off on the report, but it was still buried by 'the highest levels of the White House'
The report (part of which is pictured above) was designed to help faith leaders, business owners, educators and state and local officials as they begin to reopen. The CDC repeatedly chased up The White House for sign off on the report - but appeared to be stonewalled for weeks
White House spokeswoman Kayleigh McEnany said Friday that parts of the report had not been approved by CDC Director Robert Redfield. The new emails, however, show that Redfield cleared the guidance.
Despite this, the administration shelved the report on April 30.
As early as April 10, Redfield, who is also a member of the White House coronavirus task force, shared via email the guidance and decision trees with President Donald Trump's inner circle, including his son-in-law Jared Kushner, top adviser Kellyanne Conway and Joseph Grogan, assistant to the president for domestic policy.
Also included were Dr. Deborah Birx, Dr. Anthony Fauci and other task force members.
Three days later, CDC's upper management sent the more than 60-page report with attached flow charts to the White House Office of Management and Budget, a step usually taken only when agencies are seeking final White House approval for documents they have already cleared.
The 17-page version later released by The Associated Press and other news outlets was only part of the actual document submitted by the CDC, and targeted specific facilities like bars and restaurants.
The Associated Press obtained a copy Friday of the full document. That version is a more universal series of phased guidelines, 'Steps for All Americans in Every Community,' geared to advise communities as a whole on testing, contact tracing and other fundamental infection control measures.
On April 24, Redfield again emailed the guidance documents to Birx and Grogan, according to a copy viewed by The Associated Press.
Redfield asked Birx and Grogan for their review so that the CDC could post the guidance publicly.
Attached to Redfield's email were the guidance documents and the corresponding decision trees - including one for meat packing plants.
President Donald Trump speaks about the coronavirus in the James Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House in Washington, as Dr. Deborah Birx, White House coronavirus response coordinator, listens (file photo)
'We plan to post these to CDC´s website once approved,' Redfield wrote.
Redfield's emailed comments contradict the White House assertion Thursday that it had not yet approved the guidelines because the CDC's own leadership had not yet given them the green light.
Two days later, on April 26, the CDC still had not received any word from the administration, according to the internal communications.
Robert McGowan, the CDC chief of staff who was shepherding the guidance through the White House Office of Management and Budget, sent an email seeking an update.
'We need them as soon as possible so that we can get them posted,' he wrote to Nancy Beck, an OMB staffer.
Beck said she was awaiting review by the White House Principals Committee, a group of top White House officials.
'They need to be approved before they can move forward. WH principals are in touch with the task force so the task force should be aware of the status,' Beck wrote to McGowan.
President Trump and Robert Redfield are pictured together at The White House on April 22. At the same time CDC employees were repeatedly asking the White House to approve their 60-page report about reopening America
Redfield's emailed comments contradict the White House assertion Thursday that it had not yet approved the guidelines because the CDC's own leadership had not yet given them the green light. Redfield is pictured in a file photo
The next day, April 27, Satya Thallam of the OMB sent the CDC a similar response: 'The re-opening guidance and decision tree documents went to a West Wing principals committee on Sunday. We have not received word on specific timing for their considerations.
'However, I am passing along their message: they have given strict and explicit direction that these documents are not yet cleared and cannot go out as of right now - this includes related press statements or other communications that may preview content or timing of guidances.'
According to the documents, CDC continued inquiring for days about the guidance that officials had hoped to post by Friday, May 1, the day Trump had targeted for reopening some businesses, according to a source who was granted anonymity because they were not permitted to speak to the press.
On April 30 the CDC's documents were killed for good.
The agency had not heard any specific critiques from either the White House Principals Committee or the coronavirus task force in days, so officials asked for an update.
'The guidance should be more cross-cutting and say when they should reopen and how to keep people safe. Fundamentally, the Task Force cleared this for further development, but not for release,' wrote Quinn Hirsch, a staffer in the White House's office of regulatory affairs (OIRA), in an email to the CDC´s parent agency, the Department of Health and Human Services.
The White House has now requested the CDC refile the report after The Associated Press published a report claiming the 60-page document had been blocked by the White House
CDC staff working on the guidance decided to try again.
The administration had already released its Opening Up America Again Plan, and the clock was ticking. Staff at CDC thought if they could get their reopening advice out there, it would help communities do so with detailed expert help.
But hours later on April 30, CDC´s Chief of Staff McGowan told CDC staff that neither the guidance documents nor the decision trees 'would ever see the light of day,' according to three officials who declined to be named because they were not authorized to speak to reporters.
The next day, May 1, the emails showed, a staffer at CDC was told 'we would not even be allowed to post the decision trees. We had the team (exhausted as they are) stand down.'
The CDC's guidance was shelved - until May 7.
That morning The Associated Press reported that the Trump administration had buried the guidance, even as many states had started allowing businesses to reopen.
After the story ran, the White House called the CDC and ordered them to refile all of the decision trees, except one that targeted churches. An email obtained by the AP confirmed the agency resent the documents late Thursday, hours after news broke.
'Attached per the request from earlier today are the decision trees previously submitted to both OIRA and the WH Task Force, minus the communities of faith tree,' read the email.
The CDC report provided information for business owners about when it was safe to reopen. Pictured: Tennessee barber Greg Smith is pictured back at work Wednesday
Two pages of the 60 page 'Guidance for Implementing the Opening Up America Again Framework' are pictured
White House spokeswoman Kayleigh McEnany said Friday that parts of the report had not been approved by CDC Director Robert Redfield. New emails obtained by The Associated Press, however, contradict her assertion
'Please let us know if/when/how we are able to proceed from here.
The US has the world's highest number of coronavirus cases at 1.31 million as well as the highest death toll.
CDC is hearing daily from state and county health departments looking for scientifically valid information with which to make informed decisions. Behind the scenes, CDC scientists are working to get information to local governments.
The agency employs hundreds of the world's most respected epidemiologists and doctors, who in times of crisis are looked to for their expertise, said former CDC director Tom Frieden. People have clicked on the CDC's coronavirus website more than 1.2 billion times.
States that directly reach out to the CDC can access guidance that's been prepared, but that the White House has not yet released.
'I don't think that any state feels that the CDC is deficient. It's just the process of getting stuff out,' Plescia said.
The news comes as it is revealed that 11 members of the United States Secret Service have recently tested positive for COVID-19 while 23 others have recovered from the illness..
Some 60 employees of the agency charged with protecting President Trump and other senior government officials are currently in quarantine due to the outbreak, according to Department of Homeland Security documents obtained by Yahoo News.
Meanwhile, Mike Pence’s press secretary, Katie Miller, tested positive for the virus on Friday. She had been in recent contact with the vice president. Miller is married Stephen Miller, a top Trump adviser.
The positive test for Katie Miller came one day after White House officials confirmed that a member of the military serving as one of Trump´s valets had tested positive for COVID-19.
Trump's valet's case marked the first known instance where a person who has come in close proximity to the president has tested positive since several people present at his private Florida club were diagnosed with COVID-19 in early March.
The valet tested positive Wednesday.
The White House was moving to shore up its protection protocols to protect the nation's political leaders.
Trump said some staffers who interact with him closely would now be tested daily.
Pence told reporters Thursday that both he and Trump would now be tested daily as well.
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