President Joe Biden’s battle plan to defeat Covid-19 is’ in the spot ‘, but restoring Americans’ confidence in’ scientific guidance ‘will not be easy after four years of Donald Trump, public health experts said on Thursday.
“The most important thing the Biden government needs to do to fight the pandemic is to communicate honestly and openly with the American people about what needs to be done,” he said. Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, said. “The constant obscuration and misinformation from the Trump administration, all the ‘this is a joke,’ that killed our pandemic response.”
Dr. David Battinelli, chief medical officer and senior vice president at Northwell Health, said in an email: “The plan put forward by President Biden and his team of experts is spot on. It is based on the recommendations of leading scientific and healthcare experts and should have been the plan all along. ‘
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The experts weighed that on the first full day of his presidency, Biden signed ten executive orders aimed, among other things, at promoting the production and distribution of vaccines and forcing masks on airports and planes, trains and seagoing vessels.
As of Thursday afternoon, 24.5 million confirmed cases of Covid-19 had been reported in the United States, with 407,384 deaths, according to the latest NBC News statistics. Both are world leaders.
“We did not end up in this mess overnight, and it will take months to turn it around,” Biden said, warning that the country would likely receive 500,000 deaths next month. “But let me be equally clear: we will go through this. We will defeat this pandemic.”
Biden’s 198-page strategy to end the pandemic has been boiled down to seven key points.
Polly Price, a professor of law and public health at Emory University, said three points in particular – increasing the testing of Covid-19, the use of the Defense Production Act to promote the supply of personal protective equipment and billions dollars and inject technical assistance from the federal. Centers for the control and prevention of diseases in the distribution of vaccines – will be music to the ears of the state and local governments.
“Government officials and public health experts in particular have begged for these three actions,” Price said in an email.
Biden’s team said the Trump administration had left the task of getting the vaccination of Americans into the arms of state and local governments, leading to proliferation problems. “What we inherit is so much worse than we could have imagined,” Jeffrey Zients, Biden’s Covid-19 coordinator, said in a call to reporters on Thursday.
Price said an executive order alone would not solve the problem and that “adequate funding and technical assistance from CDC vaccination programs would be needed in most states to improve distribution” – especially if Biden’s ambitious goal of 100 million vaccination wants to reach shots in 100 days, which would be a big jump from the 17.5 million shots administered since the vaccines became available on December 14th.
A much heavier elevator, Price said, is Biden’s goal to ‘establish mask mandates nationwide by working with governors and mayors’.
“The White House task force under President Trump has issued weekly reports to states, in which they have removed the mandate from the mask and the social distance,” Price said. “This advice has been ignored in many cases, probably due to inconsistent messages from the president and the sidelines of the CDC in favor of a ‘politically’ managed task force of the White House. Restoring confidence in CDC leadership and a science-based leadership role will be tough. ‘
Last year, Trump was named by the Cornell Alliance for Science researchers as the world’s largest distributor of coronavirus misinformation. They found that nearly 38 percent of the ‘misinformation talks’ began with Trump’s doing things like promoting unproven miracles for Covid-19, diminishing the risk of coronavirus or claiming with no evidence that the pandemic’ was a farce of the Democratic Party aimed at derailing his presidency.
Trump also hampered the attempt to attract Americans to wear masks by refusing to wear one regularly at public events, even after contracting the virus himself.
Dr Anthony Fauci, the government’s biggest epidemiologist, who survived an attempt by the White House to undermine him, said on Thursday that Biden appeared to have been cut from another cloth.
“One of the new things about this government is that, if you do not know the answer, do not guess,” said Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. “Just say you do not know the answer.”
Dr Sadiya Khan, an epidemiologist at the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University, said Biden’s plan offers hope for a systematic and scientific approach to mitigating the burden of the Covid-19 pandemic and that it is a welcome change. ‘
“The plan focuses on satisfying critical needs for a strong response to public health, such as a universal mandate for masking,” Khan said. “There is good data that there is no harm or risk involved in wearing a mask, and that holds great benefit.”
Yet she warns, “although the critical issues are set out in the plan, it does not have a clear plan of action on how to achieve these things.”
“But the plan offers, for the first time in four years, a commitment to trust science, review available evidence and promote equity and access to health care,” she said.