With cases in Asia, the Middle East, Europe, Latin America, and North America, the coronavirus continues to spread at an alarming rate. The first case of unknown origin recently arrived in the United States, with a domestic outbreak considered by some experts to be inevitable.
Despite President Donald Trump's attempts to dismiss the threats posed by the virus in an effort to preserve the stock market he loves to tout, Trump held a news conference on Wednesday evening with officials from the Center for Disease Control (CDC) and the Vice President.
Trump announced that Vice President Mike Pence—who has no experience in the biomedical field and oversaw a massive HIV outbreak in his home state of Indiana during his time as governor—would be leading the charge to prepare for an outbreak.
Trump also gave lengthy answers for why the virus is of little concern and how his government is more than prepared to curb its spread.
People weren't exactly assured.
One answer in particular regarding Trump's cuts to departments like the CDC gave people pause.
Trump insisted:
"We know all the people, we know all the good people."
Watch below.
When asked to respond to his officials' assessment that an outbreak in the United States was inevitable, Trump's answer wasn't assuring:
"Well, I don't think it's inevitable. 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. We have the best people in the world. You see that from the study we have the best prepared people, the best people in the world."
Even Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, a former health advisor to Barack Obama and current World Health Organization official, described Trump's responses as "incoherent" on MSNBC's Hardball.
Watch below.
Emanuel said:
"I found most of what he said a little incoherent. You know, [Trump's] a guy that admitted that he's surprised that 25,000 to 69,000 people each year die of the flu. That just tells you how little he actually knows about public health and about the health of the American public. He just revealed how ignorant he is about the situation. We don't know how similar or dissimilar this is to the flu. We know one thing. It is actually more communicable than the flu. It passes between people very, very easily."
He wasn't the only one startled at the unreadiness displayed by Trump in Wednesday's press conference.
People knew Trump was minimizing the pandemic to preserve the stock market, but it doesn't appear the market was listening.
A vaccine for the Coronavirus isn't expected for another year, despite Trump's claims that the U.S. is very close to achieving one.
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