A senior ally of Donald Trump defended the dangerously misleading claim by the President of the United States that 99% of coronavirus cases are “totally harmless” and dismissed a national mandate to wear masks.
Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, said the number of Americans killed by Covid-19 exceeded 130,000 after a further increase in cases, according to Johns Hopkins University.
In a White House speech on Saturday, Trump said the United States has evaluated more than 40 million people “but in doing so, we show cases, 99% of which are completely harmless.”
It provided no evidence for the claim, and public health officials were unable to correct it on a holiday weekend where thousands of people flooded beaches and parks.
Questioned on CNN, Stephen Hahn, Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, said: “I am not going to analyze who is right and who is wrong.”
On Monday, appearing on the Fox News network, friendly to Trump, Meadows went further.
“I don’t even know what a generalization is,” he said. “When you start looking at the statistics and all the numbers we have, the amount of evidence we have, the vast majority of people are safe from this.
“When you look at the deaths that we have, if you are over 80 years old or if you have three what you call comorbidities: diabetes, hypertension, heart problems, then you have to be very, very careful. Outside of that, the risks are extremely low, and the President is right about that, and the facts and statistics support us. ”
Experts suspect Trump was referring to the US death rate by Covid-19, which is about 1%, but they point out that 15% to 20% of infected people end up in hospital, and some suffer from debilitating health problems. And while the overall rate of increase in deaths in the United States has been trending downward, deaths are a lagging indicator. A Reuters analysis found that at least five states have already rejected it.
While it is true that the US has stepped up the evidence, the number of new cases is increasing at a faster rate and now stands at almost 2.9 million, the highest in the world and double that of Brazil, the second country. most affected. Sixteen US states have released new daily case records this month, with Florida hitting 11,000 in a single day. Texas approved 8,000 hospital admissions on Sunday, prompting some mayors to consider issuing new orders to stay home.
Trump has also been widely condemned for failing to lead by example wearing a mask in public, while passing money to governors.
Phil Murphy, the Democratic governor of New Jersey, has advocated for a national strategy that includes a mask requirement. New Jersey is seeing “little spikes in reinfection” of people returning from Florida, South Carolina and other hotspots, Murphy said, because the United States is “as strong as our weakest link right now.”
But in his Fox News interview, Meadows said the president sees the masks as a “state to state” issue and “certainly a national mandate is not in order.”
He added: “We are allowing our local governors and our local mayors to intervene in that.”
Steve Adler, the Democrat mayor of Austin, Texas, condemned Trump’s comments.
“It is incredibly damaging and the messages from the President of the United States are dangerous,” he told CNN. “One of the biggest challenges we have is the message coming out of Washington suggesting that the masks don’t work or that they don’t need to or that the virus goes away on its own.”
Trump himself has tried to get away from the virus, apparently hoping that Americans will become insensitive to the death toll, and focus on “culture war” issues, such as the collapse of statues of Confederate generals and other historical figures, as well as rebuilding the economy of the United States.
“NASDAQ COMES ALL THE TIME HIGH!” He tweeted on Monday, promoting the latest stock market figures.
But polls by Hart Research have found that “voters reject Trump’s approach and are unwilling to trade an economic recovery for people’s health.” By a margin of 65% -35%, voters say it would not be worth reducing the number of unemployed to 8% or 9% by Election Day if that meant that deaths reached 200,000. ”
Trump is planning a campaign rally in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on Saturday, despite staff members and supporters who attended his indoor event in Tulsa, Oklahoma, last month testing positive for the virus. They include Kimberly Guilfoyle, the girlfriend of Trump’s oldest son, Donald Jr.
Kurt Bardella, a senior adviser to Project Lincoln, a political action committee dedicated to Trump’s defeat in the November presidential election, told MSNBC Morning Joe: “Fifty thousand people a day get sick, more than 100,000 are dead and all the time, this the president and this party want to embrace this ridiculous Make America Sick Again tour as he and the vice president show off across the country and continue to spread this virus and make their own people sick. “
He added: “If Donald Trump will not protect even the people closest to him, his staff, his employees, his colleagues, surely he will not care about anyone else.”
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