Name: 'America's not safe' - Leading coronavirus expert on Donald Trump's response to Covid-19
Uploaded: 2020-03-24T07:01:47.000Z
Duration: 16 min 48 s
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So what's your response to President Trump's travel ban?

The main substance of his address last night.

I I think it's, you know, I think US travel bans our holy incoherent.

They were actually five different policies that apply to different parts of the world.

For example, you're banned from a highly functioning health system like, say, Switzerland.

But you can come in if you're from a low functioning health system like Russia or sub Saharan Africa.

The epidemic here is just a cz bad, if not worse, than in most parts of Europe.

And so, by banning people have been to Europe, makes absolutely no sense.

Um, this is, you know, not a political fight.

Um, and you just can't erect travel bans and expect that you're gonna be safe.

Evidently, America is not safe to your logic.

Then you would exclude the UK to because there are more cases there than there are in some parts of you that are now banned.

And their places all around the world that have the same kind of case counts that you have in some parts of Europe.

Once you start to pick and choose among countries, start to count cases very, very little rationality behind it.

Also, the decision that President Trump made goes expressly against the World Health Organization express recommendations and they violate the United States is treaty obligations under the international health regulations, both of which briefly say what, both of which briefly say no travel bans because the point this because they're pointless, they're absolutely pointed.

O has just yesterday announced that they think that the world's on pandemic status, we're all moving from what's known as containment to mitigation.

And so containment means well, we could just stop this, you know, the way you know SARS doesn't exist anymore, or we stop murders or other kinds of novel diseases.

But H one n one you couldn't stop was influenza.

We don't even know it, but it's it's circulating all the time, this could be the same thing.

We could now be in a stage where we just wanted mitigated.

So things like social distancing, school closures, trying to postpone or cancel mass gatherings, political events, you know.

The other thing that really does upset and sadness is that President Trump doesn't become a good role model for this.

He's continued to have political rallies.

He's shaking hands with his supporters on DDE.

That doesn't just put the president at risk.

His supporters will go out to their families, their communities to people who are vulnerable and elderly and past the infection there.

We need a strong science based policy and a trusted person to tell America what we know, what we don't know and what we're gonna try to find out what we don't know and to do it honestly and straightforwardly.

But given President Trump has surrounded by experts, if he chooses to fill them in and listen to them, why then did he make a travel ban the centerpiece of this announcement because I think he's, um he's sometimes listening to his public health task force and sometimes not.

What he's doing now is he's conflating his travel and border policy with at a public health fight against Cove it.

And so he thinks that you know what worked with immigration or trade closing borders is what you need to do against this microbe, and there's no a scientific body that recommends it.

This is coming straight from the White House.

I can assure you the travel bans just don't work.

What does work are some of the things that we haven't done well, like rolling out tests.

China, South Korea, Japan have done, you know, magnitudes of orders of Maur testing than in the United States.

We've defunded our public health agencies are CDCR state and local health officials.

One of the first things he didn't office was fire the global health security chief in the National Security Council, even though he had just been warned that a pandemic was looming on DSO.

It's a it's an utter lack of preparedness and regard.

You know job number one of any politician, whether it's Prime Minister Boris Johnson or President Trump or anyone is to keep the public healthy and safe.

And unfortunately, a TTE least in America.

And actually many other countries were not doing a very good job of it.

And why the mess with the testing, in your view, what happened on what needs to happen and why didn't he address it?

Well, you know, I think we're fixing it, but it might be too little, too late.

So I do think in the next few weeks we're going to see the rollout of millions of tests.

But the truth is, is that we needed those tests weeks ago because days and weeks matter crucially in an epidemic, and we're no longer probably in a phase where we can contain it, where testing really helps you identify cases, isolate them, contact trace.

And so, you know, we had that sweet spot and the window of opportunity may have closed.

Why it didn't happen was it was it was a confluence of bad planning and a little bit of arrogance.

So the United States thought, Well, why should we buy test kits from Germany?

Why should we use W H O Approve trip task?

And so we developed them, and our manufacturers had a quality assurance problem with them on.

There were too few tests, and we didn't have enough availability.

The FDA had hadn't approved many laboratories doing it.

Guidance was fought too narrow, and the White House was just sitting back.

You know, probably it, uh, a golf golfing or Mar a Lago and so didn't coordinate or planet.

As a result, we were fatally deficient in our testing capacity.

Did people like yourself one of the world's the world's leading expert in pandemic in pandemics and our governments respond to them?

Have you been brought in to advise the White House?

You'd expect them to bring in people like you Absolutely would.

You know, I've been brought in by all of the major Democratic presidential candidates people in Congress, Um, and I h CDC, World Health Organization, But not the Trump administration.

No, not the White House Well, you know, they they The White House has long been, um, questioning of science, you know, Actually, it's not well known, but apart from climate change, which is well known and climate denial, um, the White House had advised the U.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention not to use the words evidence based or science based in its in its documents.

Why wouldn't government want to know what works and what doesn't?

There's what there's good evidence for and what there isn't.

So this is shocking disregard for science and evidence.

Now, I should say it does pain me to make these criticisms because this is a national and global crisis.

And I do believe we all need to come together on this.

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'America's not safe' - Leading coronavirus expert on Donald Trump's response to Covid-19

absolutely

tough

pandemic

evidence