US President Donald Trump has lashed out at leading American newspaper The New York Times (NYT), accusing it of carrying fake report on his administration’s Covid-19 response.
The NYT report said that President Trump was warned about the potential for a pandemic but he repeatedly played down the seriousness of the virus and focused instead on controlling the message.
“The @nytimes story is a Fake, just like the “paper” itself. I was criticized for moving too fast when I issued the China Ban, long before most others wanted to do so. @SecAzar told me nothing until later, and Peter Navarro memo was same as Ban (see his statements). Fake News!” he tweeted on Monday morning.
I am working hard to expose the corruption and dishonesty in the Lamestream Media. That part is easy, the hard part is WHY?” Trump said in his other tweet.
The lengthy investigative report said that there were warnings from the intelligence community, national security aides and government health officials about an impending pandemic and its consequences but Trump played down the crisis.
“An examination reveals the president was warned about the potential for a pandemic but that internal divisions, lack of planning and his faith in his own instincts led to a halting response,” the NYT report said.
Trump’s views were “coloured” by long-running disputes inside the administration over how to deal with China and his own suspicion of the motivations of officials inside what he viewed as the “Deep State”, the report claimed. It further said that recommendations from public health officials often competed with economic and political considerations in internal debates, slowing the path toward belated decisions.
The US government’s top infectious diseases expert Anthony Fauci acknowledged when asked about the article that the US could have saved lives by shutting down public spaces when the disease’s seriousness became clear early in the year.
“But there was a lot of pushback about shutting things down back then,” Fauci told CNN, without naming Trump.Trump soon afterward posted an interview in which Fauci said that the United States “early on did not get correct information.”
The United States, which has 4.25 per cent of the world’s population, accounts for almost a fifth of the world’s nearly 1,10,000 deaths from Covid-19 since the disease first emerged in China late last year. Worst-hit New York recorded another 758 coronavirus deaths, governor Andrew Cuomo said.
The United States has been recording nearly 2,000 deaths a day from the coronavirus, said news agency AFP.