Why the death of daily US coronavirus task force briefings should be cause for both celebration and mourning

Americans will be spared the president’s rants but they – and the world – still want to know how the country’s leaders plan to reopen the economy while ensuring public health is not sacrificed

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Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Anthony Fauci speaks during the daily briefing on Covid-19 at the White House in Washington on April 1, as (left to right) US Vice-President Mike Pence, US President Donald Trump and response coordinator for the White House coronavirus task force Deborah Birx look on. Photo: AFP

Published: 1:00am, 12 May 2020Updated: 1:30am, 12 May 2020

It’s time to celebrate and mourn the passing of the daily White House coronavirus task force briefing. As Americans watched the Covid-19 pandemic turn New York into an epicentre of death on a scale seen only in dystopian sci-fi films, they tuned into the task force briefing to understand what was happening and what the federal government was doing to end the nightmare.

There was no other choice because Dr Nancy Messonnier, director of the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) National Centre for Immunisation and Respiratory Diseases, and the CDC itself, had already been sidelined after warning of community spread of the novel coronavirus in the US.

On February 25, a day before the first confirmed coronavirus case of unknown origin emerged in the country, Messonnier had said: “It’s not so much a question of if this will happen any more, but rather more a question of exactly when this will happen … We are asking the American public to work with us to prepare in the expectation that this could be bad.”

Enraged by the panic that Messonnier’s message caused, Trump put US Vice-President Mike Pence in charge of the task force, with top epidemiology experts Dr Deborah Birx and Dr Anthony Fauci as key members.

To his credit, Trump gave Birx and Fauci a wide berth and supported their advice, which changed the pandemic’s course from a tsunami of disease rapidly threatening to overwhelm every medical facility in the country and potentially wipe out the country’s essential services, to the uncertain stalemate of a flattened epidemiological curve.

Now that the severe damage caused by shutting down a large swathe of the economy has become a political problem for Trump, the sober, scientific guidance of the two appears to be a liability. And that’s why we’re not seeing them on the White House podium any more.