President Donald Trump, on Saturday night, made an extremely faulty claim that 99% of coronavirus cases are harmless. This claim was failed to be corrected by one of his top health experts. This is an astonishing assertion as it disobeys the government’s core duty to keep the Americans health safe.
The president delivered this false claim in his speech on the 4th of July from the South Lawn of the White House. This assertion seems to minimize the devastating effects of the virus and seemed to encourage Americans to ignore the deadly risks of a pandemic that has taken 1,29,000 American lives so far.
“I’m not going to get into who is right and who is wrong,” Hahn, a member of the White House coronavirus task force said during an interview. He was asked why the President is giving false claims when the health state experts are saying the opposite.
“What I’ll say is that we have data in the White House task force. Those data show us that this is a serious problem. People need to take it seriously,” the FDA chief said.
Hahn was not ready to clarify Trumps misleading statement. This has resulted in increased trust gap between Americans and this administration over time. Hahn apparently was afraid to correct the President, this has happened repeatedly over and over again in an administration where disagreeing with or undercutting Trump has cost many appointees their jobs.
The US case fatality rate from coronavirus stood at 4.6% on Saturday when the President made the claim. The CDC estimates that a third of coronavirus cases are asymptomatic, but that does not make the disease any less threatening since people with mild or no symptoms can pass the virus on to others.
“We need to accept the fact that we’re in the second wave right now,” former FDA Commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb said Sunday during CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “It’s not a clear line of sight on how we’re going to get this under control.”
