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This weekend, a new source of contamination was made official at the White House: at least five close associates of Vice-President Mike Pence have contracted Covid-19. More bad news for Trump, eight days before the November 3 ballot.
The re-election campaign of Donald Trump and his running mate Mike Pence "finds itself in turmoil again, as at least five advisers and aides to the vice president, all working in the White House, have tested positive to Covid-19 ”, underlines the Washington Post.
And for good reason, only eight days before the presidential election of November 3 - and three weeks after Donald Trump contracted the virus and was hospitalized for a few days -, the existence of “this new source of contamination within the House -Blanche is a new and shining illustration of the failure of the Trump administration to control the pandemic ”, explains the daily.
What is more, the newspaper recalls, “it is Vice President Mike Pence who chairs the government's task force on the new coronavirus”, and the contaminations in his entourage “come to invalidate the words of Trump, who is striving to repeat to American voters that the country is 'turning the page on the pandemic' ”.
Pence, an essential worker?
Although he has been in close contact with his Covid-19 positive advisers and assistants, including his chief of staff and one of his closest associates, Mike Pence and his wife, Karen Pence, “have both been tested negative on October 24 and 25 and declared to be in good health, ”continues the daily in the capital, which underlines that the American vice-president has planned to continue his campaign trips.
He notably went to a rally in Kinston, North Carolina, on October 25 and is expected to attend the confirmation vote of Supreme Court candidate Amy Coney Barrett, scheduled for the evening of October 26 in the Washington Senate. .
The Los Angeles Times, for its part, echoes the controversy generated among health experts by the vice-president's designation as "essential worker". The latter is therefore subject to “federal regulations allowing him to continue campaigning and not to quarantine, even after being exposed to the coronavirus”.
As several public health experts point out in the columns of the Californian daily,
"campaigning is not an official duty and should not fall within the criteria for so-called essential professions such as the police, first aid or even transporters and employees in the food sector, who cannot work in distance".
