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White House trade adviser Peter Navarro asked for it. And he got it.
In a touchy interview on Sunday, “60 Minutes” correspondent Bill Whitaker asked Navarro, the newly named coordinator of the Defense Production Act, about the Trump administration’s lack of preparedness ahead of the coronavirus outbreak. He specifically questioned a shortage of personal protective equipment used to keep doctors and nurses safe while treating the contagious.
Navarro flipped it around in his response.
“I challenge you, show me the ’60 Minutes’ episode a year ago, two years ago, or during the Obama administration, during the Bush administration that said, ‘Hey, global pandemic’s coming,’” he said.
Challenge accepted. “I guarantee you we did,” Whitaker replied.
At that point, CBS showed highlights from a 2005 story on H5N1, which featured Dr. Anthony Fauci, the point person for the Bush administration’s response to the virus.
“Right now, and we all admit that, right now if we had an explosion of an H5N1, we would not be prepared for that,” Fauci, now the face of Team Trump’s response, explained in 2005. That same year, President Bush proposed a $7.1 billion program and unveiled a national pandemic strategy.
“By making critical investments today, we’ll strengthen our ability to safeguard the American people in the awful event of a devastating global pandemic, and at the same time will bring our nation’s public health and medical infrastructure more squarely in the 21st century,” Bush said.
Then, there was an episode in 2009, during the Obama years, when the CDC gave “60 Minutes” rare access for a glimpse into how it was responding to a nationwide crisis.
“This is one of the really tragic parts of this epidemic, that people who are in the prime of their life, totally healthy, can suddenly become so sick,” Rear Admiral Anne Schuchat said of H1N1 in that 2009 interview. “The virus is serious, it can cause overwhelming bacterial pneumonia in some people — the influenza followed by a bacterial pneumonia.”
Watch the clip from Sunday’s “Overtime” segment:
On Monday, Trump, who hasn’t taken widespread criticism over his response quietly, retweeted a tweet that called for Fauci to be fired following his comments that more lives could have been saved if the government were more prepared for the pandemic.
Fauci said Sunday the economy in parts of the country could have a “rolling re-entry” as early as next month, provided health authorities can quickly identify and isolate people who will inevitably be infected. He said he “can’t guarantee” that it will be safe for Americans to vote in person on Nov. 3.
