‘Extraordinarily Disappointing and Wrongheaded’: Top Pandemic Expert Pans U.S. Response to Coronavirus

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Pandemic expert Eric Toner, who works as a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, panned the Trump administration’s response to the coronavirus pandemic in an interview with CNET.

“The US response has been extraordinarily disappointing and wrongheaded,” opined Toner in an interview with CNET host Claire Reilly. “Whenever there’s been an opportunity to do the right thing, we seem to have done the wrong thing. The US has to recognize that it is competing for first or second position of the worst affected country in the world.”

During the interview, Toner also highlighted the importance of wearing face masks, saying, “I think that mask wearing and some degree of social distancing, we will be living with — hopefully living with happily — for several years.”

“It’s actually pretty straightforward. If we cover our faces, and both you and anyone you’re interacting with are wearing a mask, the risk of transmission goes way down. Being outside, having distance between you and other people reduces the risk of transmission dramatically,” Toner advised, adding that critics of mask wearing “will get over it,” but it’s “just a question of how many people get sick and die before they get over it.”

Toner was involved with a pandemic simulation at the Johns Hopkins Center in November 2019, which predicted “a fast-spreading coronavirus with a devastating impact” just months before the coronavirus pandemic took over the globe.

According to his biography, Toner has also “authored scores of scholarly papers and government reports on healthcare and pandemic preparedness, and he has organized numerous meetings of national leaders on the topics of hospital preparedness, pandemic influenza, emerging infectious diseases, mass casualty disasters, biosecurity, biosurveillance, and nuclear preparedness.”