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- Senior Trump administration officials told The Daily Beast that the president’s refusal to concede could prolong the coronavirus pandemic and lead to more American deaths.
- The coronavirus task force has not been allowed to talk to President-elect Biden’s team, according to The Daily Beast.
- The officials told The Daily Beast that without close coordination between the current and incoming administration, there could be significant delays in rolling out a coronavirus vaccine to the public.
- Public-health experts have been optimistic about Biden’s presidency, recently telling Business Insider that his leadership could bring a smoother vaccine rollout and overall decline in cases.
- Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.
President Donald Trump’s refusal to concede could prolong the coronavirus outbreak and lead to more loss of American lives, senior administration officials have told The Daily Beast.
On Monday, Trump blocked government officials from working with President-elect Joe Biden’s staff as he continues to contest the 2020 election results, the Associated Press reported.
That includes Trump’s COVID-19 task force, which has been barred from communicating with the team that will handle Biden’s response to the pandemic, according to The Daily Beast.
Multiple current senior officials working on Trump’s COVID-19 response spoke to The Daily Beast, including those working on Operation Warp Speed, a private-public coordination to speed up the process of developing and distributing a coronavirus vaccine.
These officials told the Daily Beast that without close partnership with Biden’s team, there could be significant delays in disbursing a coronavirus vaccine to the public.
“The vaccine distribution planning takes time,” one senior health official told the outlet. “And Operation Warp Speed has built up a huge database that is guiding their decisions about how best to rollout the vaccine. It’s essential Biden’s camp has access to this information so that when a vaccine does become available it can get out to the public quickly.”
Business Insider has contacted the White House for comment.
Public-health experts have been optimistic about Biden’s presidency, with some telling Business Insider’s Aria Bendix recently that Biden has the potential to create a smoother vaccine rollout and overall decline in coronavirus cases.
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Experts told Business Insider that had Trump been reelected, hundreds of thousands of additional lives might have been lost, with schools and businesses likely to have remained open in virus hotspots, and the administration’s messaging on masks mixed and politicized.
Biden, meanwhile, has supported masks and social distancing efforts, and could encourage more Americans to adopt these practices, the experts said.
Marissa Levine, a public-health professor at the University of South Florida, said she was particularly hopeful that the Biden administration will go for a federal government-led vaccine distribution plan, as opposed to the decentralized state-focused effort that the Trump campaign had been working on.
Additional reporting from Aria Bendix.
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