The Trump administration must work with the Biden transition team on coronavirus response, according to Dr. Anthony Fauci.
The nation’s leading infectious disease expert's statement comes as the White House has so far refused to start the official transition of power.
“It’s almost like passing a baton in a race,” Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said during an interview on “State of the Union.” “You don’t want to stop, and then give it to somebody, you want to just essentially keep going.”
Dr. Fauci said that the transition period is important. He believes that the process would be smoother if Donald Trump's administration will work with the Biden transition team.
When asked if health authorities would benefit from cooperating with the Biden transition team, Dr. Fauci said, “Of course it would be better if we can start working with them.”
Dr. Fauci also told CNN that Trump has not participated in a meeting of the White House coronavirus taskforce in months.
Delayed transition
Ron Klain, chief of staff for president-elect Biden, said on Sunday that the delayed transition could affect the timing of the distribution of Covid-19 vaccines, in an interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press.” The vaccine distribution may start as early as December and January, he said.
“Our experts need to talk to those people as soon as possible so nothing drops in this change of power we’re going to have on January 20th,” Klain told NBC’s Chuck Todd Sunday.
Despite the delay, President-elect Joe Biden Biden’s team has started working on their coronavirus response.
They will meet with drug companies developing Covid-19 vaccines, according to his chief of staff.
“We’re going to have meetings between our top scientific advisors and the officials of these drug companies,” Ron Klain, Biden’s newly selected chief of staff, said. Other leading companies with Covid-19 vaccine candidates in late-stage clinical trials include Moderna, Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca.
Klain, in an interview on MSNBC’s “Meet the Press,” said that Biden’s top health officials are not able to coordinate with federal government employees until the General Services Administration officially confirms the transition process.
The meetings with drug companies developing Covid-19 vaccines come as President Donald Trump refuses to concede the U.S. presidential election, though he mentioned in a Tweet that Biden had won.
Despite limited access, Klain said Biden’s team will meet with the drug makers, including Pfizer.
Meanwhile, a national lockdown of schools and businesses is “a measure of last resort,” according to Dr. Vivek Murthy, a former U.S. surgeon general that leads the group said during an interview on “Fox News Sunday.”
He said that any national lockdown at this phase of the pandemic would appear different than the closures which states imposed in the spring to contain the virus.
“In the spring we didn’t know a lot about Covid, we responded, in a sense, with an on-off switch. We just shut things down because we didn’t know exactly how this was spreading and where it was spreading, but we learned a lot more since then,” Murthy said.
