WASHINGTON: United States presidential challenger Joe Biden accused Donald Trump of giving up in the fight against COVID-19 as the president faced a new outbreak in his team and surging infections nationwide.
Nine days before the vote, Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows conceded that “we are not going to control the pandemic, which he said could only be done through “vaccines, therapeutics and other mitigation areas.” He said control was not practical because “it is a contagious virus just like the flu.”
Biden immediately seized on Meadows’ comment as he again hammered the administration over the virus , saying Meadows “stunningly admitted this morning that the administration has given up on even trying to control this pandemic, that they’ve given up on their basic duty to protect the American people.”
“This wasn’t a slip by Meadows, it was a candid acknowledgment of what President Trump’s strategy has clearly been from the beginning of this crisis: to wave the white flag of defeat and hope that by ignoring it, the virus would simply go away. It hasn’t, and it won’t,” Biden added.
the former vice president said in a statement.
Trump continued a furious pace of campaigning for a second term in the White House, with stops in New Hampshire and Maine. His repeated efforts to downplay the severity of the pandemic or shift voters’ attention elsewhere has been met with the constant drip of bad news about the virus.
The latest example was Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff Marc Short, and reportedly several of his aides, testing positive for Covid, swelling the list of administration staff to have caught the virus.
Campaign spokesman Tim Murtaugh said that Pence would continue to criss-cross the country in the waning days of the campaign. Both Pence and his wife had tested negative, he said. “The folks on his staff are in quarantine, and he relies on the very sound medical advice of the White House medical unit,” Murtaugh said.
The decision by Pence to ignore standing advice from health experts to quarantine himself drew fire from Biden running mate Kamala Harris, who also criticized Meadows for likening the coronavirus to the flu. “This is the greatest failure of any presidential administration in the history of America,” she said.
Meadows told reporters that White House doctors cleared Pence to travel after Short tested positive. Asked why Pence was not following US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines to quarantine for 14 days after such exposure, Meadows cited the vice president’s status as “essential personnel.”
Ahead of the November 3 election, both campaigns are scrambling to make their closing arguments. On Saturday, an energized Biden and former President Barack Obama accused Trump of massively mishandling the pandemic.
“Donald Trump isn’t suddenly going to protect all of us. He can’t even take the basic steps to protect himself,” Obama said, referring to Trump’s hospitalization for COVID-19 three weeks ago.
