Vice President Mike Pence announced the administration's "success" in containing thecoronavirus epidemic and slammed the press for "sounding the alarm bells over a 'second wave'" of infections.- "Such panic is overblown," Pence wrote in a
Wall Street Journal op-ed. - But the vice president failed to mention that coronavirus cases are on the rise in over 20 states — many of these states are also seeing increasing hospitalizations.
- Pence's rosy picture of the administration's fight against the coronavirus ignores the federal government's delayed and dysfunctional response to the
pandemic , which has already killed over 116,000 people in the US.
Vice President
"Such panic is overblown," Pence wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed about recent reports that the country could see a resurgence of the virus.
Pence celebrated that the daily average infection rate has dropped to about 20,000 new cases per day — down from a high of about 30,000 in April. And he pointed out that daily Covid-19 deaths in the US have declined to 750 over the last five days. The highest daily death count came on May 1, when 2,909 people in the US died of the coronavirus in 24 hours, according to data published by the World Health Organization.
"Thanks to the leadership of President Trump and the courage and compassion of the American people, our public health system is far stronger than it was four months ago, and we are winning the fight against the invisible enemy," he wrote.
But the vice president failed to mention that coronavirus cases are on the rise in over 20 states — many of the same places that were quick to loosen social distancing orders and reopen businesses. And overall, new Covid-19 cases in the US have begun to plateau, not decline.
"The media has tried to scare the American people every step of the way, and these grim predictions of a second wave are no different," he wrote. "We've slowed the spread, we've cared for the most vulnerable, we've saved lives, and we've created a solid foundation for whatever challenges we may face in the future. That's a cause for celebration, not the media's fear mongering."
Despite Pence's claims, there is significant evidence that states across the country are seeing spikes in both infections and hospitalizations in part as a result of loosening social distancing policies.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Trump-aligned Republican, slammed speculation last month that Florida would see a second wave of infections and adopted the White House's strategy of blaming the media for hyping the danger.
"We succeeded and I think people just don't want to recognize it because it challenges their narrative, it challenges their assumption, so they got to try to find a boogeyman," he told reporters on May 20.
But cases have begun to rise again in Florida over the last week and on Monday the state hit a record-high of 2,783 new cases. A recent Miami Herald investigation found that the spike in new infections cannot be solely attributed to an expansion of virus testing.
In Utah, the state epidemiologist recently told The New York Times that the state's resurgance of infections is in part a result of businesses reopening in May. Intensive care units in Arizona's hospitals are now overwhelmed after the state's governor was slow to shut down and quick to reopen businesses.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's top infectious disease expert who is helping Pence lead the White House coronavirus task force, warned in a Senate hearing last month that the country will see potentially devastating resurgences of the coronavirus if states and localities relax social distancing without heeding federal guidelines.
"My concern is that we'll start to see little spikes that will turn into outbreaks," Fauci said on May 12.
More than two dozen states have since begun reopening without meeting all of the federal government's recommendations for doing so.
Rewriting the history of Trump's pandemic response
White House officials, including Pence, have consistently downplayed the threat and severity of the public health crisis. Even as the virus spread quickly in the US, Trump argued that Covid-19 was only as threatening as the seasonal flu, Trump also falsely claimed that the coronavirus will "magically disappear" and that numbers would .
Trump predicted on February 26 that the number of virus infections in the US "is going to be down close to zero" "within a couple of days," while Larry Kudlow, director of the National Economic Council, declared the virus had been "contained."
The vice president also claimed in his Journal op-ed that Trump "rallied the American people to embrace social-distancing guidelines." In reality, the president has consistently refused to wear a face mask or maintain at least six feet of distance from others — two key guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The president is planning to hold his first campaign rally since early March on Saturday in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The campaign is expecting tens of thousands of supporters to attend the indoor rally, where face coverings will be "optional," Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel said on Monday.
Pence's rosy picture of the administration's fight against the coronavirus ignores the federal government's delayed and dysfunctional response to the pandemic, which has already infected more than 2.1 million and killed more than 116,000 people in the US alone, according to data gathered by Johns Hopkins University.
The Trump administration hesitated for weeks to pursue adequate funding for the pandemic response, and only shifted course as the virus accelerated its spread outside of China and global financial markets dropped sharply.
Experts say Trump lost crucial time to implement diagnostic testing to identify where the virus was and contain it, build up emergency stockpiles of supplies, and recommend Americans practice social distancing.
The Trump administration also weakened the infrastructure necessary for implementing an efficient response long before the pandemic hit. In May of 2018, Trump disbanded the National Security Council's pandemic response team during a reorganization of the Council under then-national security adviser John Bolton.