Vice President Mike Pence on Wednesday blamed the Centers for the Disease Control and Prevention and China for the United States’ slow response to the coronavirus.
‘I will be very candid with you and say that in mid-January the CDC was still assessing that the risk of the coronavirus to the American people was low. The very first case which was someone who had been in China, I believe took place in late January around the 20th day of January,’ he told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer.
‘The reality is that we could have been better off if China had been more forthcoming. I mean the reality is that China’s been more transparent with regard to the coronavirus than certainly they were for other infectious diseases over the last 15 years. But what appears evident now is that long before the world learned in December that China was dealing with this, and maybe as much as a month earlier than that, that the outbreak was real in China,’ he noted.
He also warned the United States could see conditions that are as bad as those in Italy, which has had over 110,000 cases and more than 13,000 deaths. Italy is also on a nationwide lockdown.
‘We think Italy may be the most comparable area to the United States at this point, for a variety of reasons,’ Pence said.
Vice President Mike Pence blamed the CDC and China for the United States’ slow response to the coronavirus
China reports its first known death from 2019 Novel Coronavirus on January 11th. The first U.S. case was reported in Seattle on January 21st – a person returning from a visit to Wuhan, China, where the outbreak began.
But internal CDC emails obtained by ProPublica, from January to early March, show that health officials were trying to stay ahead of the outbreak.
And the vice president’s charge against Beijing comes as the U.S. intelligence community concluded in a classified report to the White House that China’s public reporting on coronavirus cases and deaths is intentionally incomplete, Bloomberg News reported.
Pence was in Gordonsville, Va., to tour a Walmart Distribution Center as part of his work heading up the White House’s Coronavirus Task Force when he spoke to CNN.
He defended President Donald Trump and the administration for criticism they responded too slowly to the pandemic.
‘I don’t believe the President has ever belittled the threat of the coronavirus,’ Pence told Blitzer.
On Tuesday, the White House projected 100,000 to 240,000 deaths in the U.S. if current social distancing guidelines are maintained.
Pence argued the work the administration did – including encouraging social distancing, limiting social gatherings, and eating take out as part of their ’15 Days to Slow the Spread’ guidelines – helped keep the rate of infection down.
‘We put travel advisories and screening in place for people coming from Asia and also from Italy, then suspending travel from Europe, the U.K., and Ireland, and all the mitigation efforts that the federal government has advanced and states have — advancing,’ the vice president said.
His argument came as the United States saw more 200,000 infections and more than 4,000 deaths.
President Trump has dramatically changed his tone about the virus from two months ago.
On Tuesday, the president acknowledged the grim reality that more than 100,000 Americans could die from the coronavirus – a marked change in his previous optimistic tone.
‘It’s absolutely critical for the American people to follow the guidelines for the next 30 days, it’s a matter of life and death, frankly,’ President Trump said.
‘I want every American to be prepared for the hard days that lie ahead. We’re going through a very tough few weeks. And, hopefully, as the experts have predicted is a lot of us are predicting having studied it so hard, going to start seeing some real light at the end of the tunnel and this is going to be a very painful, a very very painful two weeks,’ he noted.
A person is taken on a stretcher into the United Memorial Medical Center after going through testing for COVID-19 in Houston
Citizens wear masks to defend against new viruses in Guangzhou, China
On Tuesday President Donald Trump offered a more sobering tone on the coronavirus
Only a few weeks ago the president spoke optimistically of reopening the country by Easter.
‘I’d love to have it open by Easter. I’ll tell you that right now. I’d love to have it open by Easter,’ he told a Fox News virtual town hall on March 24.
The president defended his past comments when asked about them.
‘If you look at those individual statements, they’re all true,’ he said Tuesday. ‘Stay calm, it will go away. You know it — you know it is going away, and it will go away, and we’re going to have a great victory.’
Pence also defended the president’s response to the virus, which has killed more Americans than were killed in the September 11th attacks.
‘The president is an optimistic person,’ he told CNN.
‘We have been – from the very beginning, when the president suspended all travel from China and stood up the White House Coronavirus Task Force in January – we have been hoping for the best, but planning for the worst. And that’s been being worked out every single day. And what the American people can see in this president every day is a leader who knows that we will get through this,’ he noted.
‘But, as the president was clear yesterday, particularly the next two weeks are going to be very tough. And our hearts and our prayers go out to the families who have suffered loss so far.’