Oh look, a top Republican was very well aware of what we were facing weeks ago and just kept fluffing Trump and carrying the party line anyway:
John Amato at Crooks and Liars:
It’s time for another House investigation.
NPR obtained a secret recording from a luncheon that the chairman of the Senate intelligence committee Sen. Richard Burr attended. On February 27 as Trump was lying to the American people about the coronavirus, NPR reports that Burr issued dire warnings to these very wealthy attendees.
“There’s one thing that I can tell you about this: It is much more aggressive in its transmission than anything that we have seen in recent history,” he said, according to a secret recording of the remarks obtained by NPR. “It is probably more akin to the 1918 pandemic.”
Yet publicly Sen. Burr remained much more muted.
Was this at the behest of Donald Trump?
If not then Sen. Burr should be held accountable for not publicly forcing the White House to take aggressive action immediately if he considered it is destructive as the 1918 Spanish flu.
Reporter Tim mack covered the story on NPR’s Morning Edition.
“There will be, I’m sure, times that communities, probably some in North Carolina, have a transmission rate where they say, let’s close schools for two weeks, everybody stay home,” he said.
Tim Mack was asked what Burr said to the public after making these statements in North Carolina and he responded, “Nowhere in press statements or other remarks did Sen. Burr provide warnings about how bad he worried coronavirus would become.”
[…]
On the same day Burr remarkably was candid to his own constituents Donald Trump was telling America a completely different tune.
Trump said, “It’s going to disappear. One day, It’s like a miracle. It will disappear,” It could get worse before it gets better. It could maybe go away. We’ll see what happens.”
The Republican Party’s cowardice and irresponsibility in the face of the Donald Trump threat has reached a new level of danger to the nation.