“I’ve never discussed this with any of them,” he said of the Biden team.
Dr Michael Os Sterholm, an adviser to President-elect J. Biden, said in a phone interview late Thursday that he had not discussed with the administration the previous proposal to lock down the country for several weeks to curb the rising tide of coronavirus. Case.
“I’ve never discussed this with him,” Osterholm told ABC News.
He also said he did not think there was a national consensus for it.
“No one will support him. It will not be supported outside the administration. It is not supported in Congress, “Osterholm said.
En Sterholm raised eyebrows after accepting a role in the Biden team this week and then mentioning his August lockdown proposal in an interview with Yahoo Finance Live in Online.
In an op-ed of Aug 7 in the New York Times, Ter Sterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Diseases Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, and Nel Kashkari, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, argued that if the government paid more for lost wages, the nation would stop spreading the virus. Can save.
“We can pay for the package right now to cover all the lost wages for individual workers, small companies, mid-sized companies or city, state, county governments for losses. We can do it all,” he told Yahoo Finance Live. Stated his August proposal. “If we had done that, then we could have locked up for four to six weeks and if we had done that, we could have reduced the number.”
The comments raised questions about whether Biden’s team is seriously considering the idea since Ter Sterholm was announced earlier in the week to join Biden’s 13-member COVID-19 advisory team.
When asked about Sterholm’s comments, Biden’s communications director, Kate Beddingfield, told CNN’s Jack Tapper that Biden focused on his plan during the campaign, which was to promote mask command across the country and to encourage testing.
“They will be informed by the best skills and public health expertise there,” he said, adding that “they are going to move forward on the plans they set out in the campaign.”
In a brief interview later that night, Ter Sterholm said his comments on Yahoo Finance Live on his August Gust lockdown proposal should not be interpreted to represent the Biden team.
But, he added, the problem is growing and he still thinks there should be a way to hurt businesses and workers with disproportionate economic losses.
“We’ll get a good answer to 200,000 more cases a day … and find out what we’re going to do here and we’re still doing it,” he said.
The country’s top infectious disease specialist Dr. Anthony Fawcett said the country would not tolerate another lockdown and that it was not necessary if the country was able to accept other options such as masks and avoid social gatherings.
“If we could take public health measures, we wouldn’t have to do that,” Foau said on ABC’s “Good Morning America” on Thursday. “The best opposite strategy to bring down the king is to shorten the steps related to public health. So if you can do it well, you don’t have to take the step that people are trying to avoid, which has a lot of consequences. Psychologist We do not want to do that. “
Fauci also said that help is really on the way, referring to a vaccine.
“You know, if you think about it figuratively – the cavalry is coming here … if we can stop there, the public health measures we’re talking about, we’ll get it under control, I promise. You. “
In a recent ABC News townhall ahead of the election, Byden said he did not think a lockout would be needed, but said he would listen to science.
“You can contain the epidemic by being rational, and not crushing the economy,” Biden said. “If you can really open businesses and schools, in fact, you provide them with the necessary guidance, as well as money capable of doing so.”
The report was contributed by Molly Nagle and Jordin Phelps of ABC News.
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