During a White House Press Briefing, members of Trump’s coronavirus task force fired back against CNN White House Correspondent Jim Acosta after he asked whether Trump is to blame for the delayed coronavirus response.

Trump answered first, slamming such accusations. The president shared that he had to make a crucial decision on whether he should issue a travel ban on China. He explained that at the time, the US had recently gone into a huge trade deal with the communist country and that his decision might bring in massive political and economic ramifications.

Then, Trump made way for White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx to further explain the situation. The doctor explained that the delay for coronavirus preparations was due to the fact that experts were “missing a significant amount of data” from China.

Birx clarified that the initial reports during the onset of the pandemic were far from the massive global scale that it had reached today. She further explained that according to the Chinese data, 50,000 people had contracted the virus against a population of 80 million residents in the Hubei province. “You start thinking of this more like SARS than you do this kind of global pandemic,” she said.

In fact, Birx admitted that when she first looked at the data, there was no indication that it would turn into a pandemic, considering the density of China’s population. The doctor added that even the medical community had “interpreted” the initial Chinese reports as something less serious.

However, experts finally grappled the massive extent and damage that the virus could bring when the outbreak happened in both Spain and Italy. Birx also shared a slide in which she explained that, based on the statistics, there are currently no data to support that Trump’s coronavirus response was too late.

Even, Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health, also slammed Acosta’s question. Fauci echoed Birx’s sentiment, saying that there was no way to know when the country should have been prepared, saying that if there wasn’t a virus, there wasn’t anything to moderate.

Then, Fauci bashed Acosta and all those who continued to accuse Trump of being responsible for the surge in coronavirus cases due to delayed government response. “Now the only trouble with that is that whenever you come out and say something like that, it always becomes almost a sound bite that gets taken out of context,” the doctor added.

Acosta pressed on that there had been cases in other countries such as in China and Italy that despite grim warnings, the countries remained unprepared.

Fauci answered that in a “perfect world,” the country might have known earlier what the real situation was in China. However, he added that there was no way the country had known and that they had acted “very, very early” as soon as they have learned about the magnitude of the virus.

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