Donald Trump Contradicts Dr. Birx, Says US Doing ‘Much Better’ Than Other Countries In Handling ‘China Virus’
Donald Trump took to Twitter on Monday to proclaim that the United States is doing much better than the media wants to report when it comes to managing the coronavirus pandemic. Claiming his administration’s handling of the outbreak has been better than people are willing to give him credit for, he once again used an alternate title for the disease that some critics have said has a racist connotation.
Trump also issued a qualifier when it came to judging how the U.S. is handling the COVID-19 crisis.
“With the exception of New York & a few other locations, we’ve done much better than most other countries in dealing with the China Virus,” Trump wrote. “Many of these countries are now having a major second wave. The Fake News is working overtime to make the USA (& me) look as bad as possible!”
Eugene Gu, a prominent Trump critic and a medical doctor, responded with a tweet directly challenging the use of the nickname some politicians have started calling the coronavirus.
“Stop calling COVID-19 the China Virus. Nobody calls the H1N1 swine flu pandemic the American Pig Flu despite the fact that the H1N1 influenza virus that killed 100 million people originated in a pig farm in Kansas in 1918 and then flared up again in California and Mexico in 2009,” Gu wrote.
Trump’s post also came just one day after one of his administration’s top medical experts gave what analysts called a dire warning. As The Inquisitr previously reported, Dr. Deborah Birx appeared on the Sunday programs this weekend and talked about how the country is dealing with the disease.
She said instead of getting rid of the coronavirus, the crisis was entering a new phase, one that might be even more dangerous. One of the reasons the disease has entered this new, more dangerous phase is because it is spreading to the Midwest.
Birx said experts are seeing more people in rural areas having to deal with infections. That is a change from the first four months officials were dealing with the pandemic when most agreed the cities and urban areas were being effected quite a bit more.
It’s not entirely clear what parts of the country Trump were referring to when he said he wanted to exclude certain parts in order to make the case his administration was handling things well. New York, Florida and Arizona have made headlines for a second “surge,” but Birx claimed most of the U.S. is seeing rising infection rates.