White House: 'We're Not Going to Control the Pandemic'

By Yuval Rosenberg

Hopes Fade as Pelosi, Mnuchin Fail to Make a Deal

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin
spoke for nearly an hour Monday, but once again were unable to
agree on terms for a massive new round of spending to boost the
U.S. economy.

Pelosi’s spokesman Drew Hammill said Pelosi was still
“optimistic” about making a deal, but the failure to reach an
agreement Monday all but guarantees that no bill will be passed
before Election Day.

Numerous issues still divide the negotiators, including the
language defining a national testing and tracing program for the
coronavirus – a problem that was supposedly nearly solved last
week. Congressional staff spent the weekend working on various
aspects of the legislation, but reportedly made little
progress.

White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow
said Monday that differences between the sides
“have narrowed,” but “the more it narrows, the more conditions come
up on the other side.”

Pelosi blamed the White House for the failure to come to terms.
“Today, we are waiting for an important response on several
concerns, including on action to crush the virus,” Pelosi said
Monday in a statement.
“Ten days after Secretary Mnuchin went on CNBC to declare that he
was accepting our testing plan, the Administration still refuses to
do so.”

Pelosi called on the White House to continue to work on a
potential deal. “We must come to agreement as soon as possible,”
she said. “But we cannot accept the Administration’s refusal to
crush the virus, honor our heroes or put money in the pockets of
the American people. The Democratic message to the American people
is: “Help Is on the Way. It Will Be Safer, Bigger, Better and
Retroactive.” It is a matter of life-or-death, and Democrats are
deadly serious about the responsibility we face.”

Focus on lame duck: As hopes fade for a stimulus bill in
the near term, lawmakers are turning their attention to the weeks
after the election, when Congress will need to pass fiscal
legislation ahead of a December 11 deadline to fund the federal
government.

“The prospects will improve after the election once we get past
the current unpleasantness that we go through every even numbered
year,” Sen. John Thune (R-SD) said Sunday. “There’s a whole range
of things that we all agree on. And I don’t know why we can’t at
least do that.”

Not everyone agrees that a stimulus bill is likely to pass
after November 3, however, with much depending on the results of
the election. Surveying the various possible outcomes of the
election. Bloomberg’s Timothy L. O'Brien and Nir Kaissar
said Monday that one of the most likely outcomes –
Biden winning with the Senate remaining in Republican hands – could
mean no deal gets done. In that scenario, the economy is “left to
its own devices, and a return to the pre-Covid economy is unlikely
anytime soon,” they wrote.

Meadows: ‘We’re Not Going to Control the Pandemic’

“We’re not going to control the pandemic,” White House Chief of
Staff Mark Meadows told CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday. “We
are going to control the fact that we get vaccines, therapeutics
and other mitigation areas.”

“It is a contagious virus, just like the
flu,” Meadows added.

Later in the
interview, Meadows said: “When we look at the number of
cases increasing, what we have to do is make sure that we fight it
with therapeutics and vaccines, take proper mitigation factors, in
terms of social distancing and masks when we can.”

Critics pounced, saying that Meadows’ comments were an admission
that the White House had capitulated in the fight to stop the
spread of the coronavirus, or a further acknowledgment that the
Trump administration has embraced a controversial strategy of
trying to reach
“herd immunity,” an approach that experts have
warned could cost millions
more lives and overwhelm the health-care system.

The comments also came after
The New York Times reported this weekend that
several members of Vice President Mike Pence’s staff had tested
positive for the virus in recent days and that Meadows “had sought
to keep news of the outbreak from becoming public.” Pence is

continuing to campaign rather than self-quarantine
in the final days of the race, with the White House maintaining the
he is an essential worker (and thus is not flouting Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention guidance).

White flag? “This wasn't a slip by Meadows, it was a
candid acknowledgement of what President Trump's strategy has
clearly been from the beginning of this crisis: to wave the white
flag of defeat and hope that by ignoring it, the virus would simply
go away,” former vice president Joe Biden said in a statement
Sunday afternoon. “It hasn't, and it won't.”

Senate Majority Whip John Thune (R-SD) said, per
Politico: “We all have a responsibility as leaders
to set an example that consists of doing the right things to stop
the spread, and I think that’s encouraging the wearing of masks and
encouraging social distancing. We all know that stops the spread.
Science proves that.”

Trump insisted Monday that his administration was still looking
to curb the spread of the virus and that it was Biden who was
waving the white flag. “No, no, he has,” Trump said in Allentown,
Pennsylvania, after being asked about Biden’s charge. “He’s waved a
white flag on life. He doesn’t leave his basement. This guy doesn’t
leave his basement. He is a pathetic candidate, I will tell you
that.”

The president again claimed his administration has done an
“incredible job” in combating the virus. “We are absolutely
rounding the corner, other than the fake news wants to scare
everybody,” Trump said.

Meadows took a similar line of attack on Monday morning. “The
only person waving a white flag, along with his white mask, is Joe
Biden,” a maskless Meadows
told reporters outside the White House. “We’re
going to defeat the virus. We’re not going to control it. We will
try to contain it as best we can, and if you look at the full
context of what I was talking about, we need to make sure that we
have therapeutics and vaccines."

Meadows added: “A national lockdown strategy or a national
quarantine strategy that is proposed by the left is not effective
[and] is not what ultimately [will] contain or control this virus.
So any suggestion that we’re waving … the white flag is certainly
not in keeping with this president.”

Trump has said that a vaccine is just weeks away, but experts
note that a vaccine likely won’t be ready for mass distribution
until the middle of next year.

Why it matters: Meadows’ comments explain so much of the
Trump administration’s mystifying pandemic response, from its lack
of a testing and tracing strategy to its push to reopen schools
without investing in needed resources, writes Leana S. Wen, a
visiting professor at George Washington University Milken Institute
School of Public Health, at
The Washington Post.

But the administration plan, counting on vaccines and
therapeutics, “is riddled with problems,” Wen says. “To begin with,
a vaccine will be far from a silver bullet. Even if it offers, say,
75 percent protection, we will need other public health measures to
reduce virus spread. Therapeutics, too, will have substantial
limitations. A medication that reduces mortality by 50 percent
means that many still will die, and those who survive may still
live with long-term effects. Contrary to Trump’s claims, there is
no cure on the horizon. Prevention will still be the best
medicine.”

Why it matters, part 2: The comments keep the
presidential race focused on the pandemic and the administration’s
response, to the apparent displeasure of the Trump campaign.
“Meadows sh*t the bed again,” one anonymous campaign adviser said,
per
CNN.

Chart of the Day: Rounding the
Corner?

From Time:

White House Hands Over Fake Health Care Plan

Before walking out on the interview in what appeared to be
anger over the tone of the questioning, President Trump told Lesley
Stahl of “60 Minutes” that his oft-cited but never-seen health care
plan is “fully developed:”

Lesley Stahl: Okay, I'll ask you
another health question, okay? ... You promised that there was
gonna be a new health package, a health care plan.
President Donald Trump:
Yeah.
Stahl: You said that it was, "Going
to be great," you said, "It's ready," "It's going to be
ready"--
Trump: It will be.
Stahl: "It'll be here in two weeks."
"It's going to be like nothing you've ever seen before." And of
course we haven't seen it. So why didn't you develop a health
plan?
Trump: It is developed, it is fully
developed. It's going to be announced very soon —
Stahl: When?
Trump: When we see what happens with
Obamacare.

The president did not explain why he was keeping the
much-anticipated plan under wraps, with or without a decision on
the fate of the Affordable Care Act from the
Supreme Court, which is set to hear arguments on a legal
challenge to the law a week after Election Day. He did, however,
provide Stahl with what the White House said was a copy of the
plan.

“Lesley, the president wanted me to deliver his health
care plan,” Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany said as she handed
Stahl an enormous tome. “It's a little heavy.”

In a widely-seen photo taken shortly after the handover,
Stahl can be seen opening the book, only to find a blank page,
sparking speculation that Trump had used an enormous book filed
with blank pages as a prop to back up his claim about having a
health care plan. But Stahl said
later that the book was not blank. Instead, it was “filled with
executive orders and congressional initiatives, but no
comprehensive healthcare plan.”

To paraphrase Samuel Beckett: We must go on waiting for
the Trump health care plan. We can’t go on. We’ll go on.

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