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Vox: The biggest challenge to America's coronavirus response? Trump.
Mar 5, 2020, 4:00pm EST
How Trump is hurting his own administration’s coronavirus response, explained by an expert.
President Donald Trump’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak in the United States has so far been a disaster.
He initially downplayed the severity of the outbreak at home, directly contradicting his own top health officials. He’s displayed a stunning lack of knowledge about basic things like how vaccines work and how quickly a coronavirus vaccine could realistically be developed and distributed to Americans. And he’s publicly spread misinformation about how deadly the disease, officially known as Covid-19, is.
All of that is extremely counterproductive to effective crisis response, especially for dealing with something so complicated as the novel coronavirus. As of March 5, there are nearly 100,000 confirmed cases around the world, with more than 3,300 dead, mostly in China. In the US, there are more than 200 total cases — including at least 10 deaths in Washington state and one death in California.
Yet Trump insists the problem is under control and that he’s doing a fantastic job.
I called up Jeremy Konyndyk, an expert in outbreak preparedness at the Center for Global Development, to get a better sense of exactly how Trump’s actions have impacted the US response and how he could do better going forward.
As the director of the USAID’s Office of US Foreign Disaster Assistance during the Obama administration, Konyndyk managed the US’s humanitarian response to the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa as well as other disasters including the 2015 Nepal earthquake and Typhoon Haiyan, which devastated the Philippines in 2013.
Konyndyk told me that although the public health officials involved in the administration’s response “are working as hard as they can” to deal with the outbreak, Trump’s failure to provide effective leadership means that “they’re not working as well as they can.”
“This isn’t a normal crisis,” Konyndyk said, “and atypical crises require real leadership from the top to solve.”
Our interview, lightly edited for length and clarity, is below.
Alex Ward
What’s your main critique of President Trump’s response to the coronavirus outbreak?
Jeremy Konyndyk
That he’s made it primarily about himself, which is consistent with how he’s handled other major crises. There has been a high degree of chaos, and the focus has been much more on managing the public narrative than addressing the actual crisis itself.
Alex Ward
Let’s unpack that. What should he be doing?
Jeremy Konyndyk
First, he needs to have an accurate understanding of the hazard and a clear-eyed understanding of the tools to deal with it. That is the starting point for the strategy.
He initially downplayed the severity of the outbreak at home, directly contradicting his own top health officials. He’s displayed a stunning lack of knowledge about basic things like how vaccines work and how quickly a coronavirus vaccine could realistically be developed and distributed to Americans. And he’s publicly spread misinformation about how deadly the disease, officially known as Covid-19, is.
All of that is extremely counterproductive to effective crisis response, especially for dealing with something so complicated as the novel coronavirus. As of March 5, there are nearly 100,000 confirmed cases around the world, with more than 3,300 dead, mostly in China. In the US, there are more than 200 total cases — including at least 10 deaths in Washington state and one death in California.
Yet Trump insists the problem is under control and that he’s doing a fantastic job.
I called up Jeremy Konyndyk, an expert in outbreak preparedness at the Center for Global Development, to get a better sense of exactly how Trump’s actions have impacted the US response and how he could do better going forward.
As the director of the USAID’s Office of US Foreign Disaster Assistance during the Obama administration, Konyndyk managed the US’s humanitarian response to the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa as well as other disasters including the 2015 Nepal earthquake and Typhoon Haiyan, which devastated the Philippines in 2013.
Konyndyk told me that although the public health officials involved in the administration’s response “are working as hard as they can” to deal with the outbreak, Trump’s failure to provide effective leadership means that “they’re not working as well as they can.”
“This isn’t a normal crisis,” Konyndyk said, “and atypical crises require real leadership from the top to solve.”
Our interview, lightly edited for length and clarity, is below.
Alex Ward
What’s your main critique of President Trump’s response to the coronavirus outbreak?
Jeremy Konyndyk
That he’s made it primarily about himself, which is consistent with how he’s handled other major crises. There has been a high degree of chaos, and the focus has been much more on managing the public narrative than addressing the actual crisis itself.
Alex Ward
Let’s unpack that. What should he be doing?
Jeremy Konyndyk
First, he needs to have an accurate understanding of the hazard and a clear-eyed understanding of the tools to deal with it. That is the starting point for the strategy.
The interview with Mr. Konyndyk continues at link: https://www.vox.com/2020/3/5/21166093/coronavirus-covid-trump-response-fox-news
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