President Trump on Monday complained the media is keeping the coronavirus pandemic front-and-center to make him look bad in the runup to the election.
He said news channels will lose interest the day after the contest, even as trend lines suggest the crisis won’t dissipate but worsen into the colder months, as states report a high baseline of transmission and increasing hospital stays for the disease.
“The Fake News Media is riding COVID, COVID, COVID, all the way to the Election. Losers!” the president said on Twitter.
Mr. Trump said record case totals are due to rampant testing in the U.S. and pointed to “many young people who heal very fast. 99.9%.”
Still, more than 900 people were reported dead from COVID-19 in the U.S. on Friday and again on Saturday, followed by 340 deaths on Sunday, according to the Johns Hopkins University tracker.
Mr. Trump says his administration is doing its best to protect the vulnerable while others get on with their lives and revive the economy. He points to groundbreaking therapies and a vaccine that should be delivered in record time, although the immunization push is still weeks away for frontline workers and likely months away for much of the general public.
“We have made tremendous progress with the China Virus, but the Fake News refuses to talk about it this close to the Election,” Mr. Trump tweeted. “COVID, COVID, COVID is being used by them, in total coordination, in order to change our great early election numbers. Should be an election law violation!”
Democratic presidential nominee Joseph R. Biden says the administration is waving the “white flag” on a virus it cannot keep out of its own house, as Vice President Mike Pence — the head of the coronavirus task force — decides if it is prudent to preside over a Senate vote to confirm a Supreme Court nominee Judge Amy Coney Barrett late Monday, given his possible exposure after five aides tested positive.
White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows on Monday said Mr. Pence’s attendance at the vote is “in flux.” He also tried to explain the remarks he made on Sunday about attempts to control the virus.
“We’re going to defeat the virus, we’re not going to control it,” Mr. Meadows told reporters. “We will try to contain it as best we can, but if you look at the full context of what I was talking about, we need to make sure that we have therapeutics and vaccines, we may need to make sure that when people get sick, that, that they have the kind of therapies that the president of the United States had. Then we can provide those emergency using authorizations. Hopefully, they’ll be coming in very short order.”
