Chelsea Clinton: Trump isn’t building public confidence in a vaccine

Chelsea Clinton, daughter of former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, slammed President Trump on Tuesday for his response to the coronavirus pandemic, calling it “unconscionable” that Trump purposefully downplayed the threat of the virus. 

Clinton said in an interview on “The View” that she blames Trump for the country’s struggle to contain COVID-19. The U.S. hitting a milestone on Tuesday of 200,000 coronavirus deaths, the most in the world. 

.@ChelseaClinton tells @TheView “it’s unconscionable that [Pres. Trump] lied to the American public about COVID.”

“There’s a lot of blame for the president and his administration for where we are and where we’re supposed to be,” she adds. https://t.co/f8u2wbJuik pic.twitter.com/kUp7O1xTEL

— The View (@TheView) September 22, 2020

“I blame him [Trump] pretty fundamentally,” said Clinton, who appeared on the show to promote her new children’s book “She Persisted in Sports.” “I think it’s unconscionable that he lied to the American public about COVID, that he’s continued to lie to the American people.” 

“He has such a blatant disregard for public health and the advice from public health experts that’s pretty uniform around things like masks, the continued importance of social distancing, how much safer it is to be kind of outside than inside, how important good ventilation is. Things that we have known for months,” Clinton added.

“I also blame him for all that he’s not doing now to help prepare for when the scientists have proven a vaccine is safe and effective at scale,” the public health advocate continued. “I blame him for not having a transparent national plan for how he’s gonna ensure that our front-line workers are vaccinated, that our elderly and medically compromised are vaccinated and then how the rest of us are gonna get vaccinated.”

Clinton’s criticism of the president comes after Trump on Monday claimed at a rally in Swanton, Ohio, that the coronavirus affects “virtually nobody” beyond elderly people and those with pre-existing conditions. 

“We now know the disease, we didn’t know it. Now we know it. It affects elderly people, elderly people with heart problems, and other problems. If they have other problems, that’s what it really affects. That’s it,” Trump told the crowd. 

Trump has drawn increased scrutiny in recent weeks following journalist Bob Woodward’s release of tapes from interviews with the president, one of which from the spring revealed that Trump admitted to intentionally downplaying the threat of COVID-19 so as not to “create a panic.”