Trump's failure to work with Biden is becoming more urgent as Covid spread
https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/16/poli...p-joe-biden-transition-coronavirus/index.html
President Donald Trump is facing a barrage of calls to permit potentially life-saving transition talks between his health officials and incoming President-elect Joe Biden's aides on a
fast-worsening pandemic he is continuing to ignore in his obsessive effort to
discredit an election that he clearly lost.
The increasingly urgent pleas are coming from inside his administration, the President-elect's team and independent public health experts as Covid-19 cases rage out of control countrywide, claiming more than 1,000 US lives a day. More than
246,000 Americans have now died from the disease, and a bitter winter lies ahead even amid encouraging news such as Monday's announcement that a vaccine developed by Moderna is
demonstrating a high success rate in early clinical trials, the second such positive vaccine news in about a week.
But instead of listening or mobilizing to tackle what some medical experts warn is becoming a "humanitarian" crisis, Trump spent the weekend during which the US passed 11 million infections amplifying lies and misinformation about his election loss. At one point,
he appeared to acknowledge Sunday in a tweet that Biden won, before backtracking with a stream of defiance on Twitter.
This came as the nation's top infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, said on
CNN's "State of the Union" Sunday that "of course it would be better if we could start working with" the Biden team that will take office on January 20.
"It's almost like passing a baton in a race -- you don't want to stop and then give it to somebody," Fauci, who has been marginalized by the outgoing President, told Jake Tapper. "You want to just essentially keep going. And that is what transition is."
Biden's incoming White House chief of staff
Ron Klain said Sunday that the President-elect's team had been unable to talk to current top health officials like Fauci about the pandemic owing to Trump's refusal to trigger
ascertainment — the formal process of opening a transition to a new administration.
"Joe Biden's going to become president of the United States in the midst of an ongoing crisis. That has to be a seamless transition," Klain said on NBC's "Meet the Press," adding that while the new administration planned to contact top pharmaceutical firms making the vaccine like Pfizer, it was particularly key to get in touch with Department of Health and Human Services officials responsible for rolling it out in the coming months.
"Our experts need to talk to those people as soon as possible so nothing drops in this change of power we're going to have on January 20th," Klain said.
But the official who is currently most influential with the President,
Dr. Scott Atlas, who critics say favors a herd immunity approach that could lead to thousands of deaths, wrote an inflammatory tweet on Sunday that exemplified the White House's contempt for unifying leadership during the pandemic. Atlas called on the people of Michigan to
"rise up" against new Covid-19 restrictions introduced in schools, theaters and restaurants by Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer -- who was recently the target of
an alleged domestic terrorism kidnapping plot.
Whitmer said in an interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer Sunday evening that she would not be "bullied into not following reputable scientists and medical professionals."
'We need to be prepared'
Fauci is not the only senior US official calling for transition talks to open. Moncef Slaoui, the official in charge of Trump's vaccine effort, told
the Financial Times in an interview that he wanted to reach out to Biden's team, but added that he couldn't do so without White House permission.
As the Biden team increases the pressure for the launch of a proper transition -- which includes office space, meetings in government agencies and millions of dollars in government funding -- members of Biden's Covid-19
advisory board spoke in increasingly alarmed terms about the effect of a continued stalemate.
Board member Dr. Celine Gounder told CNN on Saturday that the situation was like a terrorist attack or war and there needed to be a smooth handoff. "We need to be prepared, and in the absence of that critical data, there may be blind spots we're not able to anticipate and that leaves us quite vulnerable."
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