Top U.S. health officials delivered some mixed messages during the early days of the coronavirus outbreak, but their overall thrust was to take it seriously. President Trump had a louder megaphone, and in public he was playing down the threat.
. Three days after delivering his “deadly” assessment in a private call with journalist Bob Woodward, he told a New Hampshire rally on Feb. 10, “It’s going to be fine.”minimizing the severity of the virus in public
White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany highlighted comments from Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, to try to make the case that Trump didn’t lie to the public. She cited a Feb. 17 interview in which Fauci focused his concern on the seasonal flu then playing out.
If that testing showed the virus had slipped into the country in places federal officials didn’t know about, “we’ve got a problem,” Fauci said. Still, the headline put the spotlight on his remark that the danger posed by the virus was slight. It read: “Top disease official: Risk of coronavirus in USA is ‘minuscule.’”
He added: “I categorically deny the idea that there wasn’t a strong consensus of public health experts at the time saying this was a very serious problem.” As Trump left for India on Feb. 23, he told reporters that the virus was “very much under control” and that the small number of infected people in the U.S. were “very well confined.”
“Well, I don’t think it’s inevitable. It probably will. It possibly will. It could be at a very small level or it could be at a larger level. Whatever happens, we’re totally prepared,” Trump said.
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