White House Trade Adviser Peter Navarro debunked ABC News host and former Clinton press secretary George Stephanopoulos’ false claim on Sunday that the Trump administration “lost weeks” responding to the coronavirus pandemic.
“It was President Trump who was praising China all through the month of February,” Stephanopoulos claimed. “And, you know, there’s a lot of evidence that those lost weeks made a difference.”
“So, first of all, I think it’s great that we have a president who can get along with all world leaders, so that’s number one,” Navarro responded. “But number two, there’s no lost weeks. This starting gun for the China pandemic started on January 30th when President Trump had the courage to pull down the flights from China. That was an enormously courageous decision. He took a lot of heat from that.”
“And from that day, and I was personally involved in a lot of this, we were moving on three vectors of attack in February – vaccine development, development of therapeutics like remdesivir, and building up the capacity for things like N95 masks,” Navarro continued. “And the work we did throughout February has borne beautiful fruit here in the spring, because what we saw on Friday in the Rose Garden was the announcement of a 14-company race to a vaccine, with the goal of December, what we’ve seen is therapeutics like remdesivir already going into hospitals right now to save American lives, and we had [a] company like Honeywell building two factories in five weeks, George, instead of nine months, five weeks, that’s Trump time, to produce 20 million N95 masks a month.”
“So don’t tell me that we lost February because I was there. I’m right here,” Navarro concluded. “And this president was directing us to move as quickly as possible, even as publicly we were trying to figure out in the fog of war just how serious this pandemic would be.”
“It is true, according to all accounts, you were working quite hard during the month of February, including the accounts of that whistleblower Richard Bright talks about several meetings with you during the month of February on all the issues you just mentioned,” Stephanopoulos conceded. “He said you and he were allies on this, trying to break through road blocks that were coming from HHS and other parts of the government.”
However, Navarro’s timeline is a little off as the administration actually responded to the pandemic in early January as CDC Director Robert Redfield repeatedly contacted Chinese officials during the first week in January in an attempt to get U.S. officials into the country to figure out what was going on and to help contain the outbreak. It was later revealed that China allegedly lied about the outbreak because they wanted to buy themselves time to hoard medical supplies.
WATCH:
On @ABC's #ThisWeek, @GStephanopoulos gets SCHOOLED by White House trade adviser Peter Navarro on the administration’s early #COVID responsehttps://t.co/R7TI4VRF4w pic.twitter.com/eKCYQe3t8r
— Nicholas Fondacaro (@NickFondacaro) May 17, 2020
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