US presidential challenger Joe Biden on Sunday accused Donald Trump of giving up in the fight against Covid-19 as the president faced a new outbreak in his team, surging infections nationwide and an uncomfortable admission by his chief of staff.
Nine days before the vote — and with reported US coronavirus deaths having surpassed the grim total of 225,000 — Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows conceded Sunday that “we are not going to control the pandemic, which he said could only be done through “vaccines, therapeutics and other mitigation areas.”
Control was not practical, he said, because “it is a contagious virus just like the flu.”
Biden immediately seized on Meadows’ comment as he again hammered the administration over the virus, which has set records for new cases in recent days, with nearly 90,000 on Saturday, reports AFP.
“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,” the former vice president said in a statement.
“It hasn’t, and it won’t.”
Trump on Sunday was continuing a furious pace of campaigning for a second term in the White House, with stops in New Hampshire and Maine.
His repeated efforts to downplay the severity of the pandemic or shift voters’ attention elsewhere has been met with the constant drip of bad news about the virus.❐
