Former Trump deputy national security adviser Matt Pottinger says it was a ‘serious mistake’ for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to wait until April 2020 to recommend to the American public to wear masks as a means of protects against the deadly. coronavirus pandemic. In an excerpt from an interview aired this Sunday on “Face the Nation,” Pottinger told moderator Margaret Brennan that the “wrong mask is costing us dearly.”
“It was the one tool that was widely available, at least homemade, you know, cotton masks were widely available,” Pottinger said. “It was the one effective, widely available tool we had in the arsenal to deal with it … It was a serious mistake.”
When the pandemic quickly spread across the United States in March last year, the key administration and officials of the COVID-19 task force publicly discouraged wearing masks, a recommendation based in part on hospitals’ drastic shortages to personal protective equipment. .
Pottinger turned to the Taiwanese government to secure a number of masks he had handed out to White House medical staff and the national security team reported to him. He said the rest was donated to the national stock. The CDC only issued formal guidelines on wearing the mask to the public in April.
In a previous interview with “Face the Nation” last March,Surgeon General Jerome Adams told the program that “masks do not work for the general public and prevent them from getting coronavirus.” Doctors Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and the then CDC director Robert Redfield also gave similar guidance.
While Redfield testified before the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on February 27, Redfield recommends giving priority to masks for health workers in the foreground, stating that there is ‘no role for masks in the community’. The following week, Fauci told a Senate committee that masks are unnecessary “because there is currently nothing going on in the community, certainly not coronavirus, that requires the widespread use of masks.”
Adams reappears on ‘Face the Nation’ in July, this time wearing a mask and urging viewers to wear face masks when in public.
The surgeon general said at the time that the move in guidance to the American people was attributed to a better understanding of the coronavirus and how it spread. Yet former President Trump rarely wore a mask and openly questioned their usefulness.
The CDC has since given explicit mask guidance an appeal to ‘wearing a universal mask’ in all activities outside your home, as well as revised guidelines last week revealed who recommends wearing well-fitting face masks or two masks simultaneously in certain situations to improve fit and filtration to curb the COVID-19 pandemic.
Pottinger had earlier sounded the alarm within the Trump administration about the possible severity and impact of the virus on the US. He said the information he received from personal calls to doctors on the ground in China provided more accurate information than the Chinese shared. government with their CDC counterparts.
Pottinger also pointed to the collection and analysis of data related to the spread of the virus in real time as a serious problem that, according to him, has not yet been rectified under the Biden government. He said he was now speaking out in hopes of appointing the new CDC director, dr. Rochelle Walensky’s efforts to reform, support the CDC and sharpen such virus succession and surveillance to speed up its spread.
“… Where it appears, but also how its genetics evolve so that we can stay ahead of it, you need to make sure we do not hit the fist by a new variant that could harm the effectiveness of our vaccine.”
Pottinger, who began his time at the Trump White House in 2017, resigned from his post at the National Security Council shortly after the January 6 uprising on the U.S. Capitol run by Trump supporters, saying it was the moment true i felt it was appropriate for me to go. ‘
Shani Benezra reported