Those in the administration who are grappling with the pandemic’s resurgence have had little access to the White House’s megaphone.
President Donald Trump’s top health officials can no longer use the White House briefing room as a daily bullhorn for public safety messaging during the pandemic, so they’ve settled on a different strategy: contradict Trump on other platforms.
Anthony Fauci on Thursday used a panel discussion on the future of health care to warn that “we’re still in a significant problem,” an assessment at odds with the president’s assertion that things are getting better.
At a coronavirus task force briefing on reopening schools, held off the White House grounds, coronavirus response coordinator Deborah Birx appeared to cast doubt on Trump’s claim that children are not affected by the virus, cautioning that there’s little hard data on the health effects on kids.
And FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn — the only administration health official to make the rounds of last Sunday’s morning news shows — refused to defend Trump’s assertion that 99 percent of coronavirus cases are “totally harmless.”
“I’m not going to get into who is right and who is wrong,” Hahn said, later urging people to take the pandemic threat seriously.
These public health officials, who have become brand names during the coronavirus crisis, appear to have coalesced behind a series of straightforward, science-driven messages that stand increasingly apart from the president’s insistence that the threat is subsiding. They’re delivering through an array of interviews, podcasts and a fresh series of task force briefings staged throughout the Washington area.
What the American public ends up seeing is a jarring split screen, public health experts said, with fragmented but dire assessments about the pandemic response and what should be done shrouding the White House’s sunny, hands-off approach.
“Every time he speaks he undermines not only his people but his own public health message,” Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, said of Trump. “What leadership should do is lay the groundwork and allow the scientists to give the health message.”
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Trump’s top health officials can no longer use the White House briefing room as a daily bullhorn for public safety messaging during the pandemic, so they’ve settled on a different strategy: contradict Trump on other platforms https://t.co/FMtzRbT6Mw
— POLITICO (@politico) July 10, 2020
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