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Widely viewed as an extreme, the advisor later said it was not a recommendation
Dr Michael Osterholm – an adviser to President-elect Joe Biden – this week pitched the idea of a four to six week lockdown as the nation nears what he has called ‘COVID hell’, but later clarified that he had not made this recommendation to the Biden team.
The lockdown suggestion is widely viewed as extreme, and it is uncertain whether the federal government can even apply such a drastic measure. It also flies in the face of remarks by Dr Anthony Fauci, the country’s top infectious disease specialist, who said the country will not tolerate another lockdown and that masks and social distancing are the right thing to do. push.
Osterholm is the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota and was selected Monday as a member of the COVID-19 advisory committee of Biden’s transition team. However, Osterholm does not lead him and speaks independently, so his remarks do not reflect the politics of the Transition Team.
In an interview with Yahoo Finance, Osterholm specifically referred to an article he co-wrote for The New York Times in August with Neel Kashkari, the chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, telling Yahoo: “We have predicted … where we’d be now, we said it would happen if we didn’t do something different “
Osterholm said if the government could offer financial support to individuals and businesses, it could provide respite for the country to implement a temporary national lockdown.
“We have a large stash of money out there that we could borrow,” Osterholm said Wednesday, noting “the federal government’s historically low interest rates.”
He added that the government could pay for lost wages of workers, losses of small and medium-sized businesses, as well as city, state and county governments.
“If we did that we could lock in for four to six weeks, and if we did we could reduce the numbers, like they did in Asia, like they did in New Zealand and Australia, and then we could look at ourselves really looking at vaccine availability in the first and second quarters of next year and bringing the economy back long before that, ”Osterholm said.
According to NBC News, Osterholm later said the comments were not intended to be a formal proposal.
“It was not a recommendation. I never made that recommendation to the Biden group,” he said. “We never talked about it.”
Fauci said a lockdown would not be necessary if the country is able to implement public health measures.
“If we can take public health action, we wouldn’t have to,” Fauci said Thursday on ABC’s “Good Morning America”. “The best strategy against lockdown is to step up public health measures before blocking them. So if you can do this well, you don’t have to take that step that people try to avoid, which has so many implications all at once. psychologically and economically. We would like not to do that. “
Fauci also said “help is on the way”, referring to a vaccine.
“You know, if you think about it metaphorically – the cavalry is coming here… if we could just hang in there, take the public health measures we’re talking about, we’ll get that under control, I promise,” Fauci said.
Although Osterholm is an adviser to Biden, in a recent ABC News town hall ahead of the election Biden said he didn’t think there would be a need to lock down, but said he would listen to science .
“You can contain the pandemic by being rational and not crushing the economy,” Biden said. “You can open businesses and schools if, in fact, you give them the advice they need, and the money to do it.”
Asked about Osterholm’s comments, Biden’s communications director Kate Bedingfield told CNN’s Jake Tapper that Biden was focusing on the plan he presented during the campaign, which called for encouraging mask warrants to nationwide and to stimulate testing.
“He is going to be informed by the best public health expertise and expertise out there,” she said, adding that he “will move forward on the plans he presented in the campaign.”
ABC News’s Anne Flaherty, Molly Nagle and Jordyn Phelps contributed to this report.
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