Trump news: President smears vaccine whistleblower as coronavirus shutdown sees US unemployment claims soar to 36m
President claims testing is 'overrated' and demands allies investigate Obama as global death toll tops 300,000
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Donald Trump lashed out at Dr Rick Bright, who blew the whistle on the president’s efforts to promote an unproven anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine as a remedy for coronavirus, ahead of his appearance before Congress on Thursday as the number of Americans seeking unemployment benefits because of the shutdown climbed to 36m.
Those developments followed the president calling on the states to reopen their schools as soon as possible as part of lockdown-ending measures, contradicting the advice of top expert Dr Anthony Fauci on the highly dubious basis that coronavirus has “very little impact on young people”.
His remarks following more than 1.4m cases of Covid-19 and a death toll of more than 84,500 and as New York and 14 other states began investigating the possible outbreak of a coronavirus-related illness impacting children, some fatally.
The global death toll reached more than 300,000 on Thursday, with deaths in the US accounting for nearly a third of that towering figure.
After his whistle-blower complaint revealed the administration's attempts to dismiss warnings and award lucrative pharmaceutical contracts to White House connections, Dr Bright's testimony warned Americans that a "window" for an effective response against the pandemic is beginning to close as he urged Congress and the administration to lead with science and adapt a national testing strategy as nearly every state begins to ease quarantine efforts.
Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar has dismissed allegations in the complaint, and the president claims he doesn't know Dr Bright, who was charged with the relatively important task of vaccine development, though the president called him a "disgruntled employee".
The president meanwhile stopped in Allentown, Pennsylvania, for another White House-sponsored campaign stop in which he attacked his political rival Joe Biden, talked about "globalists" and claimed "it's a beautiful thing to see" health workers "running into death just like soldiers running into bullets".
He also claimed that coronavirus testing "is, frankly, overrated" while also claiming that the US has the best testing "in the world".
The president told a workers at a medical supply distribution centre: "When you test, you have a case. When you test you find something is wrong with people. If we didn't do any testing, we would have very few cases."
He also called on his Republican ally Senator Lindsey Graham to call Barack Obama to testify in his fishing-expedition "Obamagate" conspiracy. The senator said "that would open up a can of worms".
"I think it would be a bad precedent to compel a former president to come before the Congress," he said. "For a variety of reasons, I don't think that's a good idea."
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Republican senator accused of insider trading as coronavirus hit economy ‘has phone seized by FBI’
The G-Men have upped the ante on Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Richard Burr after he was accused of using advanced knowledge of the coming Covid-19 storm back in January to dump stock and enrich himself - a charge also levelled at fellow GOP senator Kelly Loeffler and Democrat Dianne Feinstein, among others.
Gino Spocchia has more on this.
Obama's Ebola czar hits back at claims Trump was not left a pandemic playbook: 'Here's the cover'
Ron Klain has knocked back Mitch McConnell's claim the previous administration did not leave behind an outbreak "game plan" for the government in spectacular style:
Here's Oliver O'Connell with mroe detail.
US has only accepted two refugees since March under Trump's new border rules
The president bragged about cracking down on illegal border crossings from Mexico at his contentious Rose Garden briefing on Monday, indicating he hopes to capitalise on the coronavirus outbreak to distort the statistics and again make the issue a central concern of the election campaign.
But, as that earlier poll suggests, it's looking much more like being a referendum on his handling of the virus - a framing decidedly not to Trump's advantage as things stand.
Shutdown sees US unemployment claims rise another 3m to top 36m
Here's Chris Riotta with the latest alarming unemployment update from the US.
Trump lashes out at whistleblower and crows over Republican special election victories
The president begins his day by smearing Dr Rick Bright on Twitter ahead of his testimony before Congress today, insisting he is "a disgruntled employee, not liked or respected by people I spoke to".
He has also been taking credit for Tom Tiffany and Mike Garcia's wins in Wisconsin and California respectively this week - and using the former as an occasion to pressure the state's Democratic governor Tony Evers into reopening, in spite of the lack of let-up in the ongoing public health crisis.
He follows that with more positive bluster - it's surely too early to say whether reopening can be considered safe and a success and what about the 84,000+ dead?
Virus spikes could emerge weeks after US economic reopenings
US states are beginning to restart their economies after months of paralysing coronavirus lockdowns, but it could take weeks until it becomes clear whether those reopenings will cause a spike in Covid-19 cases, experts said Wednesday.
The outbreak's trajectory varies wildly across the country, with steep increases in cases in some places, decreases in others and infection rates that can shift dramatically from neighborhood to neighbourhood.
"Part of the challenge is although we are focused on the top-line national numbers in terms of our attention, what we are seeing is 50 different curves and 50 different stories playing out," said Thomas Tsai, assistant professor at the Harvard Global Health Institute. "And what we have seen about Covid-19 is that the story and the effect is often very local."
As we’ve seen, a handful of states started easing their lockdowns about two weeks ago, allowing reopenings by establishments ranging from shopping malls in Texas to beach hotels in South Carolina to gyms in Wyoming.
Sparsely populated Wyoming, which has some of the lowest infection numbers in the United States, plans to reopen bars and restaurants on Friday. Georgia was one of the first states where some businesses were allowed to open their doors again, starting on 24 April with barber shops, hair salons, gyms, bowling alleys and tattoo parlours.
But it may be five to six weeks from then before the effects are known, said Crystal Watson of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.
"As we saw early in the year, epidemics of Covid-19 start slow and take some time to build and become evident," Watson told the AP in an email.
In Geneva, Switzerland, meanwhile, a top World Health Organisation official warned that it's possible the new coronavirus may be here to stay.
"This virus may never go away," Dr Michael Ryan said at a press briefing. Without a vaccine, he said, it could take years for the global population to build up sufficient levels of immunity.
"I think it's important to put this on the table," he said. "This virus may become just another endemic virus in our communities" like other previously novel diseases, such as HIV, which have never disappeared, but for which effective treatments have been developed.
It can take three to five days for someone newly infected with the coronavirus to feel sick, and some infected people won't even have symptoms. Since testing is mostly reserved in the US for those with symptoms, it can take two weeks or so - the time for one group of people to spread the virus to another - to have enough testing data to reflect a surge in cases.
"If you are doing adequate testing, it will take two to three weeks" to spot an increase, Dr Ashish Jha, director of Harvard's Global Health Institute, said on Wednesday as he prepared to speak to a congressional subcommittee on the crisis.
He urged a dramatic increase in testing.
"It was the failure of testing that caused our country to shut down," Jha said. "We need federal leadership on the level of testing, guidance on whom to test and federal help on the sheer capacity, the number of tests that can be done. We still do not have the testing capacity we need to open up safely."
New coronavirus clusters have surfaced around the world as nations struggle to balance restarting their economies and preventing a second wave of infections.
Authorities in the Chinese city of Wuhan, where the pandemic first began late last year, reportedly are pressing ahead to test all 11m residents for the virus within 10 days after a handful of new infections were found.
South Korea confirmed 29 more coronavirus cases over the past 24 hours as it battles a spike in infections linked to nightlife spots in Seoul, threatening the country's hard-won progress in the fight against pandemic.
And Lebanese authorities reinstated a nationwide lockdown for four days beginning on Wednesday night after a spike in reported infections and complaints that social distancing rules were being ignored.
AP
Hillary Clinton calls out Jared Kushner for suggesting delaying 2020 election
The defeated 2016 Democratic candidate has rebuked Trump's son-in-law after he appeared to suggest he had some some say in whether or not November's ballot is postponed because of the pandemic.
Trump moves projected coronavirus death toll again and says Obama and Biden should be jailed in latest Fox sitdown
Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo has been airing a new interview with the president this morning, in which he revises the projected US death toll from the coronavirus again - we're up to 100,000 now, from zero - says his predecessor and challenger should be in prison, that Russia wanted Hillary Clinton to win in 2016 and that Democrats would rather have mass casulaties on their hands than see him serve a second term in the Oval Office.
Wow.
With anyone else, you'd have every right to expect any one of those lines to be a very big deal indeed.
'No more Mr Nice Guy!' President urges Lindsey Graham to call Obama to testify before Congress
As Dr Rick Bright appears before the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee and its chairman, Democrat Anna Eshoo, gavels the session open by blasting Trump’s “incompetence, denial, delay, and disorganised response" to coronavirus, the president issues another stunning tweet as a distraction.
This one calls on his friend, the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman, to subpoena the 44th president to take questions on his latest cooked-up conspiracy theory, which would surely be unprecedented:
Here's John T Bennett on this breaking story.
Georgia reports no initial spike in Covid-19 cases after reopening
The word from governor Brian Kemp on one of the first states to return to business-as-usual after lockdown is "so far, so good", says Louise Hall.
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