President Donald Trump is facing a barrage of calls to permit potentially life-saving transition talks between his health officials and incoming President-elect Joe Biden’s aides on a fast-worsening pandemic he is continuing to ignore in his obsessive effort to discredit an election that he clearly lost.
The increasingly urgent pleas are coming from inside his administration, the President-elect’s team and independent public health experts as Covid-19 cases rage out of control countrywide, claiming more than 1,000 US lives a day. More than 246,000 Americans have now died from the disease, and a bitter winter lies ahead even amid encouraging news such as Monday’s announcement that a vaccine developed by Moderna is demonstrating a high success rate in early clinical trials, the second such positive vaccine news in about a week.
But instead of listening or mobilizing to tackle what some medical experts warn is becoming a “humanitarian” crisis, Trump spent the weekend during which the US passed 11 million infections amplifying lies and misinformation about his election loss. At one point, he appeared to acknowledge Sunday in a tweet that Biden won, before backtracking with a stream of defiance on Twitter.
This came as the nation’s top infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, said on CNN’s “State of the Union” Sunday that “of course it would be better if we could start working with” the Biden team that will take office on January 20.
“It’s almost like passing a baton in a race — you don’t want to stop and then give it to somebody,” Fauci, who has been marginalized by the outgoing President, told Jake Tapper. “You want to just essentially keep going. And that is what transition is.”
Biden’s incoming White House chief of staff Ron Klain said Sunday that the President-elect’s team had been unable to talk to current top health officials like Fauci about the pandemic owing to Trump’s refusal to trigger ascertainment — the formal process of opening a transition to a new administration.
Courtesy-CNN
