A top aide of President Donald Trump on Sunday triggered a potentially devastating storm close to end of polling, saying the United States was not trying to control the Covid-19 pandemic.
“We’re not going to control the pandemic,” Mark Meadows, chief of staff to the president, told CNN in an interview, adding, “because it is a contagious virus just like the flu.”
Meadows said the administration’s strategy would be to “control the fact that we get vaccines therapeutics and other mitigation efforts.”
With Covid-19 cases surging across the country in what is being called the third wave, Trump’s handling of the epidemic has cast doubt on his re-election chances. Joe Biden, his Democratic challenger, has made it his chief argument for electing him and denying the president a second term.
More than 224,000 Americans had been killed and 8.5 million infected by the coronavirus till Sunday, according to the John Hopkins University tracker.
And over 83,000 new infections were reported in the last 24 hours in a new surge that contradicts the president and his aides’ repeated claims that US was “rounding the corner”.
{{/usCountry}}And over 83,000 new infections were reported in the last 24 hours in a new surge that contradicts the president and his aides’ repeated claims that US was “rounding the corner”.
{{/usCountry}}Trump’s White House is facing fresh scrutiny of its own mitigation efforts that could not protect the president and has seen an increasing number of members of the staff contracting the virus — now members of Vice-President Mike Pence’s staff.