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Hit by ‘disinfectant’ blowback, Donald Trump skips daily briefing on Covid-19
The president’s aides and allies have for some time felt that these briefings in which he has torn into reporters and political rivals and touted an untested treatment as a “game-changer” were being counterproductive.
President Donald Trump did not hold a daily news briefing of the coronavirus task force in weeks on Saturday as he sought to stave off continuing blowback to his shocking suggestion to try common disinfectants to kill the deadly pathogen inside infected people’s bodies, as they do externally, on surfaces.
But the president blamed the media for it. “What is the purpose of having White House News Conferences when the Lamestream Media asks nothing but hostile questions, & then refuses to report the truth or facts accurately. They get record ratings, & the American people get nothing but Fake News. Not worth the time & effort!,” he wrote on twitter.
It was no immediately clear if he will not hold these briefings at all, or lead them as he has been for weeks.
The president’s aides and allies have for some time felt that these briefings in which he has torn into reporters and political rivals and touted an untested treatment as a “game-changer” were being counterproductive. And Republicans fear increasingly that his handling of the crisis could cost them dearly in the November elections, according to news reports.
Questions have continued to be raised about the administration’s response and failure to prepare for the epidemic that had till Sunday morning claimed 53,934 lives, up by 1,806 in the last 24 hours, and infected 939,249 people, with 32,796 new cases. The United States has suffered the most from this pandemic.
As Trump used the briefings to update the country on the state of the epidemic and measures and guidelines in place to combat it he was also seen by critics as turning them into a version of his political rallies which he could not hold because of the social distancing guidelines anymore.
And, in which he often strayed into questionable territory, such as his robust endorsement of the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine, which is proving to be more harmful than beneficial, according to a growing number of studies, and his suggestion last Thursday to try disinfectants.
Trump has said he said it as a “sarcastic question”.
Public health officials and experts condemned it and even his own top officials were horrified. “I certainly wouldn’t recommend the internal ingestion of a disinfectant,” Food and Drug Administration commissioner Stephen Hahn, who is also a member of the White House task force., told CNN.
But some people, scared and concerned, did not heed the warning. City officials in New York reported receiving an unusually high number of calls from people who feared having ingested disinfectants in the 18 hours after Trump’s remarks, according to reports in US media.
The Poison Control Center, a department of the New York city’s health department managed a total of 30 cases of possible exposure to disinfectants between 9 p.m. Thursday and 3 p.m. Friday, a spokesman said told the Daily News, a local news publication.
Nine were exposed to Lysol, 10 to bleach and 11 about household cleaners in general, according to the spokesman. No one died or required hospitalization.
