Jared Kushner defends administration’s pandemic response, says Trump blames China for the virus

Since then, Trump has repeatedly downplayed the seriousness of the virus as the epidemic it has wrought in the United States — the worst in the developed world — has apparently damaged his re-election chances. He has even claimed coronavirus will “go away” on its own, though those statements and countless others like them directly contradict the consensus among epidemiologists and other medical professionals.

Asked by CNBC’s Hadley Gamble whether it had been a mistake for the U.S. not to have a national program to fight the virus, Kushner said the government oversaw the procurement, production and distribution of resources needed during the pandemic, such as masks and ventilators.

“With regards to a national strategy, the job of the federal government was to get the resources that the country needed,” he said.

“You heard all these hysterical reports about doctors on the front lines not being able to get masks, not having enough ventilators, you had governors requesting a lot more ventilators than they needed, and again, every patient in America that needed a ventilator got a ventilator, President Trump distributed them properly,” Kushner told CNBC’s Hadley Gamble.

The U.S. government has been criticized over its handling of the coronavirus epidemic, where over 5.4 million confirmed cases of the virus have now been recorded and where there have been over 170,000 deaths, according to Hopkins’ data on Sunday.

Article source: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/08/17/jared-kushner-says-us-president-trump-doesnt-play-coronavirus-politics.html