Acting Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security Ken Cuccinelli urged calm over fears of a coronavirus epidemic, crediting President Trump with a preemptive response to the global outbreak.
The president has been “whipping us with wet noodles for weeks now” to stay ahead of the spread of coronavirus, Cuccinelli said Friday at the Conservative Political Action Conference in National Harbor, Maryland. “There’s a reason the threat is low in the United States as of now.”
Cuccinelli stressed that while the president spoke about the risks of the outbreak for the first time this week, he has been “very aggressive” in wrangling a behind-the-scenes countervirus response.
“It is scary,” Cuccinelli said, adding that the country should consider the possibility that the virus’s spread could worsen. The president, he stressed, “has had us preparing for this.”
A senior health official in the Trump administration said the low number of reported cases in the U.S. was due to measures taken by the government to limit travel. “We aggressively controlled our borders and therefore slowed the entrance of the virus in the U.S.,” National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases Director Nancy Messonier told reporters in a phone call on Friday.
On Friday morning, Trump’s chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, said the administration had been working on a plan for six weeks and blamed the president’s impeachment trial in the Senate for the lack of attention paid to the White House’s efforts. Just 15 lawmakers showed up to the Capitol Hill meeting the White House convened for members of Congress in January, Mulvaney said.
