Vice President Mike Pence painted a rosy ― and misleading ― portrait of the U.S. government’s response to the coronavirus and the current state of the crisis in an op-ed published Tuesday in The Wall Street Journal.
In one section, Pence, whom President Donald Trump appointed in late February to lead the White House’s coronavirus task force, praised all 50 states for beginning to reopen in a “safe and responsible manner.”
But Dr. Anthony Fauci, the lead infectious disease expert on the task force, suggested that isn’t the case during an interview with NPR earlier Tuesday.
“There certainly were states that did not strictly follow the guidelines that we put out about opening America again,” Fauci said. “There were rather well-delineated gateway criteria followed by phase 1, phase 2 and phase 3.”
He added: “Clearly there were states that ― left to their own decision about that ― went ahead and opened to a varying degree … certainly before they got to the benchmarks that they needed to get.”
The contradicting statements serve as an example of the distance between the propaganda pushed by the White House and some of the warnings raised by Fauci and other public health experts.
In his nearly 800-word piece, Pence accused the press of “fear mongering” in its coverage of the pandemic and dubbed the nation’s response to the virus “a success.”
“We’ve slowed the spread, we’ve cared for the most vulnerable, we’ve saved lives, and we’ve created a solid foundation for whatever challenges we may face in the future,” the vice president wrote. “That’s a cause for celebration, not the media’s fear mongering.”
In fact, the U.S. has had more documented COVID-19 cases and deaths than any country in the world, despite having less than 5% of the global population. More than 2.1 million people have tested positive for the virus nationwide and over 116,000 have died.
Trump initially downplayed the threat of the virus as scientists warned that it would surely spread across the country with devastating consequences.
During a campaign rally in late February, two days after a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention official sounded the alarm about the virus’s potential i