Post by Admin on May 13, 2020 20:06:38 GMT
Speaking to TIME’s senior White House correspondent Brian Bennett as part of the TIME100 Talks series on Tuesday, Kushner said “there’s risk in anything, but the President carries the burden of the 30 million Americans who have lost their jobs due to this historic effort to save lives.”
Asked about Dr. Anthony Fauci’s warning to lawmakers Tuesday about reopening too soon, Kushner said Fauci is “incredibly knowledgeable,” but that his advice must be taken alongside other factors.
“You have a lot of policymakers like the President or the governors who were elected by the people in their states and in their country to take the input of the experts and professionals, and then make decisions weighing a lot of different factors,” Kushner said.
Kushner spoke to TIME in a wide-ranging interview, answering questions about the delay in ramping up U.S. testing capacity, whether he prioritized contracts from allies in ordering medical supplies for states, the CARES Act and Trump’s re-election prospects in the fall.
As of May 12, there have been nearly 1.4 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the United States and more than 81,000 deaths. More than 30 million Americans have filed for unemployment since the pandemic hit the U.S.
Kushner’s comments came one day after the White House held a briefing to tout its testing capacity, during which Trump said the U.S. had “prevailed” on testing. And at the end of April, Kushner himself had called the U.S. coronavirus response a “success story.”
“I don’t want those comments to be taken in a way other than to contextualize how much our hearts break for the people who have passed and their families,” Kushner said when asked about them Tuesday. “We know that it’s a terrible tragedy, and one life [lost], as the President said, is too many. But faced with the magnitude of what this pandemic was and what it could have been…the situation could have been a lot worse. So we really worked very, very hard to create a better outcome than could have been otherwise.”
The U.S. has completed more than 9.3 million COVID-19 tests as of May 11, according to Kushner, with each state on track to be able to perform almost double the number of tests per capita than South Korea, whose response to the virus has been lauded globally.
Asked about Dr. Anthony Fauci’s warning to lawmakers Tuesday about reopening too soon, Kushner said Fauci is “incredibly knowledgeable,” but that his advice must be taken alongside other factors.
“You have a lot of policymakers like the President or the governors who were elected by the people in their states and in their country to take the input of the experts and professionals, and then make decisions weighing a lot of different factors,” Kushner said.
Kushner spoke to TIME in a wide-ranging interview, answering questions about the delay in ramping up U.S. testing capacity, whether he prioritized contracts from allies in ordering medical supplies for states, the CARES Act and Trump’s re-election prospects in the fall.
As of May 12, there have been nearly 1.4 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the United States and more than 81,000 deaths. More than 30 million Americans have filed for unemployment since the pandemic hit the U.S.
Kushner’s comments came one day after the White House held a briefing to tout its testing capacity, during which Trump said the U.S. had “prevailed” on testing. And at the end of April, Kushner himself had called the U.S. coronavirus response a “success story.”
“I don’t want those comments to be taken in a way other than to contextualize how much our hearts break for the people who have passed and their families,” Kushner said when asked about them Tuesday. “We know that it’s a terrible tragedy, and one life [lost], as the President said, is too many. But faced with the magnitude of what this pandemic was and what it could have been…the situation could have been a lot worse. So we really worked very, very hard to create a better outcome than could have been otherwise.”
The U.S. has completed more than 9.3 million COVID-19 tests as of May 11, according to Kushner, with each state on track to be able to perform almost double the number of tests per capita than South Korea, whose response to the virus has been lauded globally.