Tag: Trump lies about coronavirus

CDC Chief Testifies About Trump’s Misleading Coronavirus Claims

The head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Tuesday contradicted a number of false claims pushed by Donald Trump about the current COVID-19 outbreak.

CDC Director Robert Redfield was testifying before the House Appropriations Committee’s Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies about his agency’s budget request for the 2021 fiscal year.

During the hearing, Rep. Lois Frankel (D-FL) read a list of statements Trump had made about the outbreak and the administration’s response efforts in recent weeks, asking Redfield whether he agreed with any of them. Continue reading.

Trump gets a fact check on coronavirus vaccines — from his own officials

Trump often boasts that he knows more than so-called experts, but the stakes for his exaggerations have rarely been so high.

Nearly every time President Donald Trump has talked about a coronavirus vaccine, he has gotten a real-time fact check from a health expert sitting nearby.

“So you’re talking over the next few months, you think you could have a vaccine?” Trump asked during a meeting with top health officials on Monday.

“You won’t have a vaccine,” corrected Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar after some cross talk. “You’ll have a vaccine to go into testing.” Continue reading.

‘You don’t want to go to war with a president’

How Dr. Anthony Fauci is navigating the coronavirus outbreak in the Trump era.

Anthony Fauci might be the one person everyone in Washington trusts right now.

But at 79, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases is in the thick of one of the biggest battles of 35 years in the role: The race to contain coronavirus when the nation is deeply polarized and misinformation can spread with one tweet — sometimes, from the president himself.

“You should never destroy your own credibility. And you don’t want to go to war with a president,” Fauci, who has been the country’s top infectious diseases expert through a dozen outbreaks and six presidents, told POLITICO in an interview Friday. “But you got to walk the fine balance of making sure you continue to tell the truth.” Continue reading.

White House chief of staff claims press covering coronavirus to take Trump down

The Hill logoWhite House acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney on Friday downplayed the threat of the coronavirus but acknowledged likely school closures and disruptions to public transportation in the United States as a result of the outbreak.

He also accused the press of peddling a false narrative about the administration “scrambling” to contain the virus, saying he briefed Congress with other top health officials six weeks ago. He accused the media of ignoring the coronavirus until now because publications were too preoccupied with Trump’s impeachment before that, which he called a “hoax.”

“Why didn’t you hear about it?” Mulvaney told an audience at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) Friday morning in a discussion with Stephen Moore, an economic expert at the Heritage Foundation. “The press was covering their hoax of the day because they thought it would bring down the president.” Continue reading.