Category: Not Factual

Trump says, ‘Anybody who wants a test gets a test’ after Pence says US can’t meet coronavirus testing demand

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Topping a week of conflicting statements from the administration about how many tests the U.S. is now able to administer for the coronavirus, President Donald Trump on Friday told reporters at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta that “anybody who wants a test gets a test.”

U.S. health officials started the week by defending themselves to members of Congress for a shortage of tests across the country. That shortage, along with tight restrictions from the CDC on who could be tested, allowed infected people to go undetected and further spread it, say health experts. 

After being rebuked for the delays, Food and Drug Administration chief Stephen Hahn on Tuesday told the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions that, with the aid of private sector partnerships, the government would be able to test roughly a million individuals by the end of the week.

But by Thursday, U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar told reporters he expects public laboratories this week to test 400,000 people. Later that day, Vice President Mike Pence said “we don’t have enough tests today to meet what we anticipate will be the demand going forward.” Pence is leading the government’s response to the COVID-19 outbreak.

A spokesperson for the CDC did not respond to requests to confirm the number of people who have been tested for the coronavirus. 

Part of the administration’s hope in expediting its testing capability was partnering with the private sector to help make up for limitations created by what experts say is an underfunded public health system. 

The CDC is partnering with Integrated DNA Technologies to manufacture the tests under a CDC contract. IDT is partnering with commercial labs, including LabCorp and Quest for the testing, both companies have confirmed. 

“What was different was this response,” said John Auerbach, CEO of the Trust for America’s Health and former head of the CDC’s policy office. “The administration said it wasn’t just going to use public health labs as its core — it was going to say to the commercial sector, you develop these, get them out the door. … [But] that assumed they had the capacity to get these kits out the door.”

“But there are no real mechanisms for monitoring how much their capacity is — it’s kind of a wild west.”

LabCorp said Thursday its coronavirus test would be available at 6 p.m. that day. Quest said its test would be available Monday. 

Meantime the number of infected people continues to grow. There are at least 245 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the U.S., according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. Pence said Friday that 21 people on the Grand Princess cruise ship off California have tested positive.

The growing count has led to mounting frustration by many in Congress over what they say are the president’s conflicting statements and a lack of transparency amid a public health crisis. 

“They won’t disclose how many test kits are now available or when they will be fully deployed, but we know that they haven’t come close to the one million mark,” said Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., in a statement to CNBC. 

“Congress has done its job in providing emergency funding for the Administration to acquire, stockpile, and distribute an adequate supply of diagnostics,” Schakowsky wrote. “The question remains, is this Administration capable of doing so?”

[CNBC]

Trump said Warren’s campaign failed because she’s ‘mean’ and lacks talent, and not because of sexism

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President Donald Trump on Friday said that Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s campaign did not fail because of sexism, but because she’s “mean” and lacks “talent.” 

“I think lack of talent was her problem. She had a tremendous lack of talent,” Trump told reporters as he signed an $8 billion coronavirus bill, before going on to say Warren was a good debater who “destroyed Mike Bloomberg…like it was nothing.”

“People don’t like her. She’s a very mean person. And people don’t like her. People don’t want that,” Trump added. 

Trump, who has put migrant children in cages, mocked a disabled reporter, said you have to treat women “like sh–t,” called for a ban on Muslims from the US, attacked Gold Star families, and criticized a widely-revered dead senator, went on to say that people like “a person like me, that’s not mean.”

Warren dropped out of the race on Thursday after coming up short in a series of voting contests, which included coming in third in the primary in her home state of Massachusetts. There was a brief moment last fall in which Warren was at the top of some national polls and looked like a potential frontrunner, but her campaign really lost momentum after coming in third in the Iowa caucuses and an abysmal result in the New Hampshire primary (she came away with no delegates). 

The Massachusetts senator garnered a lot of praise when she wiped the floor with Bloomberg in a recent presidential debate, but it did not translate into success with voters — particularly on Super Tuesday.

Many political pundits and commentators, as well as supporters of Warren, have said that sexism played a role in her campaign’s struggles. Warren ran a robust platform, exemplified by her slogan: “I’ve got a plan for that.” She was generally viewed as stronger than other candidates on specifics surrounding policy proposals and, as Trump said, a good debater. 

The same day Warren dropped out, the United Nations Development Programme released a new analysis that found 90% of people — both men and women — are biased against women. The study, which was conducted across 75 countries, also found about 50% of people think men make better political leaders than women. 

But as Insider politics reporter Kayla Epstein recently reported:

[Business Insider]

Trump denies spreading coronavirus misinformation on “Hannity”

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President Trump denied in a Thursday tweet that he told Fox News’ Sean Hannity that people who are feeling sick should continue to go to work amid the coronavirus outbreak.

The state of play: While Trump didn’t explicitly say that sick Americans should go to work, he did state that those with mild coronavirus cases can still recover while going about their daily lives — an assertion that contradicts public health officials’ recommendations on how to manage the illness.

“I NEVER said people that are feeling sick should go to work. This is just more Fake News and disinformation put out by the Democrats, in particular MSDNC. Comcast covers the CoronaVirus situation horribly, only looking to do harm to the incredible & successful effort being made!”

— Trump’s tweet

  • What Trump said on “Hannity”: “If we have thousands or hundreds of thousands of people that get better just by sitting around and even going to work — some of them go to work, but they get better.”
  • What the CDC recommends: “People who are mildly ill with COVID-19 are able to isolate at home during their illness. You should restrict activities outside your home, except for getting medical care. Do not go to work, school, or public areas. Avoid using public transportation, ride-sharing, or taxis.”

In the same interview, Trump contradicted the World Health Organization’s assertion that the virus has a 3.4% mortality rate, calling it “a false number” because of the number of people who have had “very mild” cases and recovered without being diagnosed.

  • “They don’t know about the easy cases because the easy cases don’t go to the hospital. They don’t report to doctors or the hospital in many cases. So I think that number is really high. Personally, I would say that number is way under 1%,” he claimed without evidence.

[Axios]

Reality

Donald Trump tweeted he never told Sean Hannity sick people should go to work.

Watch Donald Trump tell Sean Hannity sick people should go to work: https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1235411751950221312

Trump Unleashes More Coronavirus Misinformation on National Television

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As health experts sound the alarm over the Trump administration’s woefully inadequate response to United States’ unfolding coronavirus outbreak, President Trump continued to push misinformation about the virus while offering dangerous public safety advice.

The president cast doubt on the World Health Organization’s estimate that the global death rate from the virus is 3.4 percent, telling Sean Hannity on Wednesday that “I think the 3.4 percent is really a false number—and this is just my hunch—but based on a lot of conversations with a lot of people that do this because a lot of people will have this and it’s very mild. They’ll get better very rapidly, they don’t even see a doctor, they don’t even call a doctor. You never hear about those people.”

He continued by referring to the coronavirus as the “coronaflu.” Later in the phone appearance, Trump appeared to suggest it was fine for people sick with the coronavirus to go to work, once again undermining the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s urgings that the infected should self-isolate and limit outside contact.

“If we have thousands or hundreds of thousands of people that get better just by sitting around and even going to work—some of them go to work—but they get better. Then when you do have a death, like you’ve had in the state of Washington, like you had one in California, I believe you had one in New York,” Trump said. (New York has not yet reported any deaths from the coronavirus.)

It was the latest in a string of public appearances by the president where he seemed to attempt to minimize the virus’s threat even as documented cases in the US steadily rise. Hours before phoning into Hannity’s Fox News program, Trump debuted a new strategy to combat mounting criticism of his administration’s actions, by falsely claiming that former President Barack Obama, who left office more than 1100 days ago, is to blame for the current delay in testing for the virus. “The Obama administration made a decision on testing that turned out to be very detrimental to what we’re doing,” Trump claimed at a White House meeting on Wednesday. “We undid that decision a few days ago so that the testing can take place in a much more rapid and accurate fashion.”

[Mother Jones]

President Trump blames Obama for coronavirus testing problems

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That’s President Donald Trump deflecting the criticism his administration has been facing over its response to the coronavirus.

The comments were made during a meeting with airline executives at the White House on Wednesday. Here’s a clip:

According to the New York Times, Trump was referring to a regulation that limited the ability of laboratories run by states, universities and private companies to conduct screenings not approved by the FDA. Now, those labs are allowed to use tests they independently developed.

“It’s really very, very important,” CDC director Robert Redfield said at the White House event. “It’s what’s changed the availability of testing overnight.”

Here’s Vice President Mike Pence’s explanation:

Still, Trump’s deflection came under fire from his critics.

But CNN, quoting an aide to Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander, reported that while the Obama administration had proposed stricter test oversight, no changes were ever actually approved.

Obama didn’t immediately respond to the accusation, but he did chime in on Twitter about how to navigate the coronavirus outbreak

[MarketWatch]

White House Bans Filming At Coronavirus Briefing

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The Trump White House faced widespread criticism on Tuesday after Vice President Mike Pence conducted a press briefing on the coronavirus outbreak, but members of the media were not allowed to record video or audio.

The administration ― which only last week vowed to be “aggressively transparent” with the public about the spread of the virus that has now killed nine people in the U.S. ― only allowed still photographs to be taken, CNN’s Jim Acosta and other journalists in attendance tweeted. 

“I asked Pence why the Coronavirus briefing is off camera today. He said he believes the briefing will be back on cam tomorrow,” Acosta later posted, noting “the closest thing to an explanation we got” was “when Pence said Trump was on camera a bunch today.”

Obama-era White House chief photographer Pete Souza said he “can’t ever remember a time when a VP or POTUS spoke in the White House press briefing room and video/audio was prohibited.”

“It’s like they’re imploding,” added Walter Shaub, the former head of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics.

The Trump administration’s coronavirus response has been widely criticized as disorganized and slow. Trump himself has repeatedly sought to downplay the risks, sometimes with outright falsehoods.

[Huffington Post]

Trump’s ignorance was on public display during coronavirus meeting with pharmaceutical execs

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It’s understandable that during a White House meeting on Monday with pharmaceutical executives and public health officials, President Donald Trump pressed them to develop and deploy a vaccine to Covid-19 (the disease caused by the novel coronavirus) as quickly as possible. Beyond the obvious public health benefits, a vaccine could help allay fears, stabilize markets, and quell criticisms that his administration was unprepared for or mismanaged the response to the outbreak.

What is harder to wrap one’s brain around, however, is the level of ignorance Trump displayed about how vaccines work.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has already said it will take up to 18 months to develop a vaccine for Covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus— a time frame much shorter than the usual two- to five-year window. There are straightforward reasons it’s impossible to roll out new vaccines for public consumption overnight: They need to be developed, tested for effectiveness and safety during trials, approved by regulators, manufactured, and then distributed. Each of those steps takes time.

At one point during the meeting, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, tried to explain to the president that it would be at least a year and probably closer to 18 months before a coronavirus vaccine could be available to the public. But Trump didn’t want to hear it, and kept pressing the executives to come up with something before November’s election.

What is harder to wrap one’s brain around, however, is the level of ignorance Trump displayed about how vaccines work.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has already said it will take up to 18 months to develop a vaccine for Covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus— a time frame much shorter than the usual two- to five-year window. There are straightforward reasons it’s impossible to roll out new vaccines for public consumption overnight: They need to be developed, tested for effectiveness and safety during trials, approved by regulators, manufactured, and then distributed. Each of those steps takes time.

At one point during the meeting, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, tried to explain to the president that it would be at least a year and probably closer to 18 months before a coronavirus vaccine could be available to the public. But Trump didn’t want to hear it, and kept pressing the executives to come up with something before November’s election.

“I mean, I like the sound of a couple months better, if I must be honest,” Trump said, seemingly oblivious to the fact that the “couple months” time frame execs mentioned merely referred to a vaccine being ready for trials.

Later, Trump pressed the pharmaceutical leaders on why they can’t just release the coronavirus drugs their companies are working on tomorrow — in the process revealing that he doesn’t understand the concept of clinical trials.

“So you have a medicine that’s already involved with the coronaviruses, and now you have to see if it’s specifically for this. You can know that tomorrow, can’t you?” he said. 

“Now the critical thing is to do clinical trials,” explained Daniel O’Day, CEO of Gilead Sciences, which has two phase-three clinical trials going for remdesivir, a potential treatment for the coronavirus. “We have two clinical trials going on in China that were started several weeks ago … we expect to get that information in April.”

Trump also wondered aloud why the flu vaccine can’t just be used for coronavirus, asking, “You take a solid flu vaccine, you don’t think that could have an impact, or much of an impact, on corona?”

“No,” one of the experts at the table replied.

Following the meeting, an unnamed administration source told CNN that they thought the scientists and experts were able to convince Trump that a vaccine would not be available for a year or longer.

“I think he’s got it now,” the source told CNN.

But if Trump does get it now, that wasn’t apparent during a political rally in Charlotte hours later, during which the president claimed pharmaceutical companies “are going to have vaccines I think relatively soon.”

Trump went on to portray the coronavirus problem in ethnonationalist terms: “There are fringe globalists that would rather keep our borders open than keep our infection — think of it — keep all of the infection, let it come in,” he said, before expressing surprise that tens of thousands of Americans die from the flu each year.

“When you lose 27,000 people [from the flu] a year — nobody knew that — I didn’t know that. Three, four weeks ago, I was sitting down, I said, ‘What do we lose with the regular flu?’ They said, ‘About 27,000 minimum. It goes up to 70, sometimes even 80, one year it went up to 100,000 people.’” (According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there have not been more than 51,000 flu-related deaths in the US over the past decade.) 

“I said, ‘Nobody told me that. Nobody knows that.’ So I actually told the pharmaceutical companies, ‘You have to do a little bit better job on that vaccine,’” Trump continued.

Then, following the rally, the White House released a statement not detailing new federal initiatives to help stop the spread of Covid-19, but highlighting tweets from Republicans praising the administration’s response.

On Tuesday, Trump gave a speech to the National Association of Counties Legislative Conference in which he brought up the coronavirus but then expressed confusion about the difference between cures, which eliminate diseases, and therapies, which treat them.

While Trump may be confused about what’s going on, Vice President Mike Pence — head of the administration’s coronavirus task force — did claim during a news conference on Monday that treatments for Covid-19 could be available within the next couple of months. He did not provide details, however.

[Vox]






Trump Goes After ‘Very Disreputable’ CNN For Coronavirus Coverage: They’re Trying to ‘Instill Fear in People

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President Donald Trump, in comments to reporters Friday, targeted CNN over the network’s coverage of coronavirus.

Mick Mulvaney said Friday that the media is using the coronavirus news to hurt the president, saying at CPAC, “The press was covering their hoax of the day because they thought it would bring down the president.”

Trump was asked today if he thinks “this is a hoax.”

Trump responded by going after CNN in particular, calling it a “very disreputable network” that’s “doing everything they can to instill fear in people and I think it’s ridiculous.”

“Some of [the Democrats] are trying to gain political favor by saying a lot of untruths,” he claimed.

Trump touted the success the U.S. has seen so far and added, “Some people are giving us credit for that and some people aren’t, but the only ones that aren’t — they don’t mean it, it’s political, it’s politics.”

Earlier today CNN media reporters called out Fox News for comments similar to the president’s, with Brian Stelter saying, “They feel the need to protect the president from potential political damage by saying the Democrats and the media are out to get you. I think most will see through it, but it is still reprehensible.”

[Mediaite]

Trump endorses far-right conspiracy theorist who lied about Ilhan Omar “partying” on 9/11

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Terrence Williams is a pro-Trump social media personality known for pushing wackjob conspiracy theories, such as a fact-free attempt to link the Clintons to Jeffrey Epstein’s death and falsely claiming Democratic Congresswoman Ilhan Omar partied on 9/11.

He was recently alerted by Facebook his page was at risk for being unpublished for pushing misinformation.

Donald Trump tweeted his support for Terrence because… of course he did.

Trump lashes out at Fox News for new poll showing him losing to all the Democratic candidates

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President Donald Trump lashed out on Friday at the network that normally covers him so favorably over a new national poll that shows him losing hypothetical head-to-head popular vote matchups against all six of the top Democratic presidential candidates.

“Worst Polls, just like in 2016 when they were so far off the mark, are the @FoxNews Polls,” Trump tweeted on Friday morning.

That tweet came 37 minutes after Fox News displayed a graphic on the air highlighting the results of a new network poll that shows Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, and Mike Bloomberg beating him handily, with Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg, and Amy Klobuchar leading him by spreads that are within the margin of error.

As is the case with most everything Fox News broadcasts, Trump was apparently watching. And he apparently didn’t appreciate the reminder about it not in fact being the case that a majority of the country loves him.

His attack on Fox News serves as a reminder that despite a rough-and-tumble and still-uncertain Democratic primary, he’s eminently beatable in November.

While it’s obviously possible for Trump to repeat what he did in 2016 and win the election even if he loses the popular vote, there’s almost no chance of him losing the popular vote by a deficit of this magnitude against Biden, Sanders, or Bloomberg and still prevailing in the Electoral College. (Some other polls have been more favorable to Trump’s odds.)

And considering the poll was conducted during the early part of a week that saw a historic stock market slide amid concerns about the coronavirus pandemic and the Trump administration’s capacity for dealing with it, there’s reason to believe the president’s standing isn’t improving anytime soon. Of course, we’re still months from the general election, and it’s worth remembering that Hillary Clinton also had a healthy lead over Trump at this point in the 2016 election cycle.

Still, the poll is mostly bad news for Trump. But instead of doing some self-reflection, he’s doing what he’s in the habit of doing and attacking the messenger.

[Vox]

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