Trump selected Pence as In-Charge of the U.S Coronavirus Response

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On Wednesday, U.S President Donald Trump has announced at a news conference that Vice President Mike Pence will be in-charge of the United States coronavirus response. Pence will be in charge of the White House Coronavirus Task Force and report directly to the U.S President. The task force members include the U.S State Department, the Centers for Disease Control, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Transportation. The HHS Secretary Alex Azar has been selected as the chairman of Task Force. Trump said, “I’m going to be putting Vice President Mike Pence in charge and he’s going to be working with the professionals, doctors and everybody else that is working. The team is brilliant”.

President Trump said the threat of a full pandemic in the United States is still low. He added, “If you can count on the reports coming out of China that spread has gone down quite a bit. The infection seems to have gone down over the last two days. As opposed to getting larger, it’s actually gotten smaller”. The recent data indicates a total of 2,716 deaths with 10 new cases of coronavirus reported in China. It is noteworthy that total 78,074 cases of infection have been reported in China. Mike Pence said, “The people of this country can be confident that under your leadership, we will continue to bring the full resources of the federal in coordination with our state and local partners”.

Donald Trump also explained the thought process behind the budget for U.S coronavirus preparedness. He said the White House was looking to spend whatever’s appropriate. Trump said, “We started out by looking at certain things. We’ve been working with the Hill very carefully, very strongly, and I think we have good bipartisan spirit for money. We were asking for $2.5 billion and we think that’s a lot”. He added, “But the Democrats and I guess Senator [Chuck] Schumer wants us to have much more than that and normally in life, I’d say ‘We’ll take it, we’ll take it.’ If they want to give more, we’ll do more. We’re going to spend whatever’s appropriate. Hopefully, we’re not going to have to spend so much we really think we’ve done a great job in keeping it down to a minimum”.