US President Donald Trump's coronavirus response shows "denial" of science, according to former Secretary of State John Kerry.
The former government official said the country has “reneged on its role as leader of the free world” under Trump. Kerry also said it failed in its response to the coronavirus crisis.
Kerry criticized Trump’s “reckless” coronavirus response during the CogX conference in London on Monday. He added that the president failed to demonstrate international leadership through the outbreak.
“The odds were against us in the beginning because you had China, which is always somewhat secretive and which clearly began to manage the news in the beginning, and you had the United States with a leader who has no ability to tell the truth, or face it, or to lead,” he said.
Kerry became President Barack Obama's secretary of state from 2013 until 2017.
“The President’s early and decisive action to slow the spread of the coronavirus prevented about 60 million infections in the United States and saved up to two million American lives,” Sarah Matthews, special assistant to the president and deputy press secretary at the White House, told CNBC via email.
“This administration will continue our science-based approach as we continue to safely reopen our economy.”
The coronavirus has hit almost 2 million people in the US and led to over 112,000 deaths across the country.
Poor leadership
According to a study published on Monday by the University of California at Berkeley, the coronavirus lockdowns over the last two months helped to prevent almost 5 million additional confirmed cases.
“Any leader could have stood up within the G-20 and said ‘we’re the most developed nations, we have the biggest resources, we’re going to be the most impacted because of the way we live, therefore we’ve got to move.’ And that didn’t happen,” he said.
Kerry mentioned that there are “some things that only the United States can do.” He recalled the Obama administration’s handling of the West African Ebola outbreak in 2014.
“I will never forget sitting in the situation room being told that 1 million people were going to die over four months if something didn’t happen,” he said.
“President Obama immediately deployed 4,000 troops to West Africa. We didn’t know what we didn’t know, but we knew we had to summon a global response. So in the end with Ebola, 11,000 people died — 11,000 too many, it’s a tragedy, but it’s not a million.”
Cavalierly
On the other hand, Trump managed the current public health crisis “cavalierly” and “recklessly,” Kerry claimed.
“President Obama put together a playbook for any administration that followed us — it happened to be the Trump administration — and they threw it away, they ignored it,” he said.
“This was a denial of science. It was a denial of experts. It was a denial of facts and evidence by procrastinators, by deniers, by people who want to live with an alternative reality.”
“The United States has obviously been very hurt in the last few years with respect to that leadership, and it hasn’t been present,” he said. “The United States has reneged on its role as leader of the free world and today, frankly, there is no leader of the free world.”
