9/11/20
Joe Biden has created a war-cabinet-in-waiting on the coronavirus pandemic, with major figures from the Obama, Clinton and George H.W. Bush administrations drafting plans for distributing vaccines and personal protective gear, dramatically ramping up testing, reopening schools and addressing health-care disparities. The effort began six months ago when the campaign consulted David Kessler, a former Food and Drug Administration commissioner under Presidents Bush and Bill Clinton, and Vivek H. Murthy, surgeon general under President Barack Obama, on how to run a presidential campaign during a pandemic. The pair, along with a growing cadre of volunteer health experts, has been working behind the scenes to craft plans that could take effect Jan. 20, when the next president will take the oath of office, said Jake Sullivan, a senior policy adviser on the Biden campaign. Biden has laid out a far more muscular federal approach than has President Trump, whose “failures of judgment” and “repeated rejection of science” the Democrat first pilloried in a Jan. 27 op-ed about the crisis.
Biden has said that he would urge state and local leaders to implement mask mandates if they are still needed, create a panel on the model of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s War Production Board to boost testing, and lay out detailed plans to distribute vaccines to 330 million people after they are green-lighted as safe and effective. The Democratic presidential nominee’s “public pronouncements are not just about laying out an agenda for voters, but giving shape to an operational plan that he’s already starting to think about now for what Day One is going to look like,” Sullivan said. Biden has sought to make the crisis a referendum on Trump’s competence as well as his character. At a campaign event Wednesday in Warren, Mich., he noted Trump’s assertions in recorded interviews with writer Bob Woodward that the president had intentionally played down the lethality and rapid spread of the coronavirus last winter, calling them “beyond despicable. . . . He knew how deadly it was. He knew and purposely played it down. Worse, he lied.” Biden has also hammered Trump’s failure to take decisive steps to stem the spread of the virus.
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