Pressed on the apparent shift in messaging on Wednesday afternoon, Trump conceded that “it is a change, a little bit,” and said he made the decision to leave the group in place for the foreseeable future after learning on Tuesday “how popular the task force is.”
“When I started talking about winding it down, I’d get calls from very respected people saying, ‘I think it would be better to keep it going,’” he told reporters at the White House. “It’s done such a good job. It’s a respected task force. I knew it myself. I didn’t know whether or not it was appreciated by the public. But it is appreciated by the public.”
The comments followed 24 hours of whiplash, during which governors, public health officials and the medical community began to grapple with how key decisions would be made and how information would flow to the public in the task force’s absence.
The Association of State and Territorial Health Officials said it was committed to ensuring that accurate information about the coronavirus would be disseminated if the task force disbanded.
“If there is a void, the void will get filled,” Marcus Plescia, ASTHO’s chief medical officer, said.
Officials worried about a decision-making vacuum, contending that the task force has played a crucial role in coordinating the federal response to the crisis and that the public has relied on trusted voices like Dr. Deborah Birx, the task force coordinator, and Dr. Anthony Fauci, the federal government’s top infectious-diseases expert.
“The task force has served as a coordinating body for decision making,” said Casey Katims, the federal liaison for Washington state. Without a task force, “we would be left to wonder how will they coordinate some of these decisions that require a whole-of-government response.”
The federal government typically relies on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other public health agencies to lead the communication strategy during national emergencies. Instead, the president created the task force to lead the response out of the White House, and the CDC’s daily media briefings were sidelined in mid-March.
“Your emergency-response command center gives you a whole range of capabilities,” said Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association. “Taking it down too soon is a terrible mistake. You lose, at the very least, situational awareness of what’s happening around the world and the ability to coordinate rapidly.”
The administration tried to quell concerns on Tuesday, and inside the White House, there was discussion of creating a smaller group focused on a vaccine and therapeutics to supplant the larger task force. One senior White House official stressed that the change wouldn’t sideline medical voices within the administration. But the backlash to the news was fierce, prompting Trump to muse that he “had no idea how popular the task force is.”
Trump said that the administration would “be announcing two or three new members” to the task force by next Monday, and that those appointees would “be more in the neighborhood, probably, of opening our country up.”
At the same time, “there may be one or two” task force members who “will be less involved that were more involved with the original formation of the ventilators and the ventilator systems,” he said.
Moments later, Trump appeared to make good on that promise. During a meeting in the Oval Office with Gov. Kim Reynolds of Iowa, the president invited an epidemiologist from the state who accompanied the governor to join the task force, according to a press pool report.
When the epidemiologist, Dr. Caitlin Pedati, who is the medical director for the Iowa Department of Public Health, accepted his offer, Trump quickly reassured Reynolds he didn’t want to “steal her,“ only borrow her.
Trump acknowledged, however, that “at a certain point, we won’t need a task force,” adding: “I look forward to when we can close the task force, because then the job will be essentially, hopefully over.”
Caitlin Oprysko contributed to this report.
Source: politico.com
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