“These models have been so wrong from day one. Both on the low side and the upside. They’ve been so wrong, they’ve been so out of whack. And they keep making new models, new models and they’re wrong,” the president said.
White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany said earlier Tuesday the Johns Hopkins model, included in a government document obtained Monday by the New York Times, relied on “faulty assumptions” about mitigation efforts and didn’t represent federal government projections.
“The people of our country are warriors,” Trump said of Americans, some 69% of whom are “somewhat” or “very” worried about contracting Covid-19, according to an analysis of polls by fivethirtyeight.com.
Vice President Mike Pence said earlier Tuesday the White House has begun discussing disbanding the coronavirus task force, which could happen as soon as later this month.
“Mike Pence and the task force have done a great job, but we’re now looking at a little bit of a different form and that form is safety and opening. And we’ll have a different group, probably, set up for that,” Trump said in Phoenix.
When asked if the move meant he considers the mission of combating the virus to be accomplished, Trump replied: “No.”
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.