CNN’s Camerota Grills Pence on Corrections to Trump’s Coronavirus Speech: ‘Why the Confusion?’

CNN’s Alisyn Camerota put Vice President Mike Pence through a gauntlet of questions regarding President Donald Trump’s newly-announced policy on the coronavirus.

Following Trump’s Oval Office address where he said America would broadly ban European travel, the White House had to issue a series of corrections that walked back his framing on how his policy would impact travel and trade. So when Pence gave an interview to New Day, Camerota led with the two biggest post-speech clarifications and asked “why the confusion?”

“I don’t think it was confusion,” Pence answered. “The president took another historic step, just like he did in January with China, to suspend all travel from Europe for the next 30 days.”

As Pence spoke about how Trump made his decision “on the spot” after getting briefed on the coronavirus situation in Europe, he also elaborated on how Americans will be screened at airports and new CDC guidelines would be enacted. Shortly after that, Camerota asked him if former Trump administration homeland security advisor Tom Bossert was “wrong” to say European travel restrictions are a “poor use of time & energy” at this point.

“I think our health experts would disagree strongly,” Pence responded. “We learned yesterday 70% of all the new cases for coronavirus in the world happened in Europe. And probably most concerning to the president was as of yesterday, when we looked at 35 states on the map where we had Coronavirus cases, 30 of those cases could be traced to contacts in Europe…We’re not doing a travel ban as our strategy. The suspending all travel for 30 days from Europe is a part of the strategy. The other part is an aggressive mitigation strategy.”

The interview continued with Camerota pressing Pence after he disputed the CDC’s numbers on how many virus tests have been conducted around the country.

Watch above, via CNN.