White House chief of staff Mark Meadows on Sunday defended Vice President Mike Pence’s continued travel around the country despite his close contact with top aide Marc Short.
In a contentious interview on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Meadows insisted Pence is deemed “essential personnel,” and pushed back on host Jake Tapper’s assertion the travel is mainly campaigning for President Donald Trump.
“I’m not saying he is not campaigning,” Meadows shot back. “I'm saying that is only part of what he is doing.”
“Essential personnel, whether it's the vice president of the United States or anyone else… he is …wearing a mask, socially distancing and when he goes up to speak he will take the mask off and put it back on. He is wearing a mask as it relates to this particular thing because the doctors have advised him to do that.”
But Tapper pressed Meadows, asking “Why not get control of the pandemic?”
“We are making efforts to contain it,” Meadows asserted.
“By running all over the country and not wearing a mask?” Tapper countered,
“Let me just say this. What we need to do is make sure that we have the proper mitigation factors whether it's therapies or vaccines or treatments to make sure that people don't die from this,” Meadows replied.
“But to suggest that we are going to actually quarantine all of America … Joe Biden is saying lock everybody down.”
“Not what he said,” Tapper barked back.
Meadows also asserted mandating masks won’t be the answer to handling the pandemic.
“Even those experts that you talked about, when we talk about masks, I say if mask is the answer and mandating mask is the answer, can we put all of our students back in schools if we just mandate masks and make sure the teachers wear masks? Will they be safe is in the answer was no,” he said.
Meadows mocked Biden’s mask wearing and said the Democratic presidential challenger lacks any coronavirus plan.
”What is Joe Biden's plan for the pandemic? How is he going to do it? He is going to wear two masks like he does every day and suggest we skip Thanksgiving. He doesn't have a plan,” he said.
“He has rhetoric because you and I both know for 47 years, he's talked about things and not done things. You've covered him. I know him. The American people should know his record.”
According to Meadows, the nation is in “much better” shape than nine months ago in terms of therapeutics and PPE to protect against the virus.
“We were learning about this virus and we continue to learn about this virus and where we are today is much better than where we were nine months ago,” he said. “When it comes to all of the things that we have been able to do in record speed whether it was PPE, whether it was closing down our borders, whether it was creating ventilators or vaccines in record time this president has done it all and what you want a leader to do.”
The United States set a nationwide daily record of more than 83,000 reported COVID-19 infections on Friday, with Oklahoma, Illinois, New Mexico and Michigan among states announcing new record highs in daily confirmed cases on Saturday.]
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