A top aide to President Donald Trump on Sunday unleashed a potentially devastating storm near the end of the vote, saying the United States was not trying to control the Covid-19 pandemic.
“We are not going to control the pandemic,” Mark Meadows, the president’s chief of staff, told CNN in an interview, adding, “because it is a contagious virus like the flu.”
Meadows said the administration’s strategy would be to “control the fact that we get therapeutic vaccines and other mitigation efforts.”
With Covid-19 cases increasing across the country in what is called the third wave, Trump’s handling of the epidemic has cast doubt on his chances for re-election. Joe Biden, his Democratic rival, has made it his main argument for electing him and denying the president a second term.
More than 224,000 Americans had died and 8.5 million were infected by the coronavirus as of Sunday, according to the John Hopkins University tracker.
And more than 83,000 new infections were reported in the past 24 hours in a further increase that contradicts repeated claims by the president and his aides that the United States was “turning the corner.”
The Trump White House is facing new scrutiny of its own mitigation efforts that failed to protect the president and has seen a growing number of staff contracting the virus, now members of Vice President Mike Pence’s staff.
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