A top Australian health official has slammed US President Donald Trump’s handling of the coronavirus crisis as an “unmitigated disaster”.
In an interview with The New Daily, the CSIRO’s director of Health and Biosecurity Dr Rob Grenfell said we are in a “global war against the virus” and that the world will judge leaders like Mr Trump by how they approach the pandemic.
“When we look at the washout of this event in about six to 12 months’ time, when we look at how countries performed … the leaders will be measured on how they approached this,” Dr Grenfell said.
“We’re all alarmed by Brazil’s response – it’s catastrophic – where, in fact, clearly health authorities are not being listened to at all, or in the US, where states are actually having to rally against the president.”
Like Mr Trump, Brazil’s right-wing president Jair Bolsonaro has ignored public health advice in favour of reopening the economy despite soaring case numbers.
The Latin American nation has overtaken Russia as the second global hotspot for coronavirus cases behind the US, with as many as 15,000 new cases being detected in 24-hour periods.
In the US, more than 100,500 people have died from COVID-19 and confirmed case numbers have surpassed 1.7 million.
A post-truth pandemic
Dr Grenfell said Mr Trump’s spreading of baseless accusations, including claims the virus was created in a Chinese laboratory, was “unhelpful”.
“There has been a solid attempt by a number of news agencies to find out the facts and interrogate those facts, and then there have been others looking for sensationalism, for conspiracies and other things,” he said.
For months, Mr Trump has been spreading misinformation and offering fraudulent health advice about the virus.
Until recently, he had promoted an anti-malarial drug linked to heart problems as a possible cure, and has even suggested Americans consider drinking bleach as a form of protection.
Finally, social media giants are starting to catch up.
On Tuesday, Twitter applied its first fact-checking label to a tweet by Mr Trump as part of its new “misleading information” policy aimed at combating misinformation about the coronavirus.
In an apparent attempt to cast doubt over the upcoming 2020 presidential election result, Mr Trump tweeted that new mail-in ballots to be used in some US states would be “anything less than substantially fraudulent”.
The president responded to the new fact-checking label by complaining that Twitter was “stifling free speech”.
The blame game
Though Mr Trump’s misinformation was “dangerous”, US political analyst David Smith said it wasn’t fair to blame him for “everything that had gone wrong” in the US.
“Clearly not everything that happened was Trump’s fault,” said Dr Smith, a senior lecturer in American politics and foreign policy at the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney.
“There was a major problem with testing in the US and multiple failures involving state governments – for example, the New York government acted far too late – so there is a lot of blame to go around.”
He said Mr Trump’s push to reopen business in America despite rising infections was tied to his goal of re-election.
“It’s almost impossible for a president to win an election when the economy is in recession,” Dr Smith said.
“He’s going to try to blame everyone else possible for what’s gone wrong during the pandemic.”
