Daily US Times: US President Donald Trump again contradicted his own health officials’ coronavirus statements — this time on the timing for a vaccine and the importance of mask wearing and
And he demeaned the director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Robert Redfield, saying the doctor was “confused” in his congressional testimony.
On Wednesday, Redfield said that masks may be a more effective protection against coronavirus than any potential vaccine that the President can’t stop hyping. The CDC director also laid out a timeline for when the general US public could expect to start seeing results from widespread coronavirus vaccination the second or third quarter of 2021. Those statements both seemed to contradict what Trump has been saying.
During public testimony, Redfield told lawmakers that he might even go so far as to say that this face mask is more guaranteed to protect me against Covid than ”when I take a Covid vaccine, because the immunogenicity may be 70%.”
If someone don’t get an immune response, the vaccine is not going to protect him or her, but the director said ”this face mask will”, adding that the American public has not yet embraced the use of masks to a level that could effectively control the outbreak.
While responding to Redfield’s congressional testimony, President Trump took his pushback against the doctor, a step further, contradicting the agency head on two accounts: the effectiveness of masks compared with inoculation and the timeline for a coronavirus vaccine.
President Trump told reporters Redfield was “confused” when he said that.
He said: “I think he made a mistake when he said that. It’s just incorrect information.”
The President also said Dr. Robert Redfield’s comments to Congress about masks possibly being more effective than a vaccine were incorrect and that Redfield may have misunderstood the question.
Trump said: “Maybe he misunderstood it,” later adding, “As far as the masks are concerned, I hope that the vaccine is going to be a lot more beneficial than the masks.”
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