Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, a former health policy adviser in the Obama administration, said late Wednesday that he found President Trump's remarks during a news conference on his administration's response to the coronavirus outbreak a "little incoherent."
Speaking on MSNBC's "Hardball," Emanuel, now a special adviser to the director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO), said that Trump's comments indicated how little the president knew about public health.
He also stressed that health officials still do not know vital information about the virus, which first appeared in China and has since infected more than 80,000 people in more than three dozen countries. The U.S. has reported 60 confirmed cases of the virus.
"I found most of what he said a little incoherent," Emanuel said, pointing to Trump's admission that he was shocked by the number of people who die from the common flu annually.
"You know, [Trump's] a guy that admitted that hes surprised that 25,000 to 69,000 people each year die of the flu. That just tells you how little he actually knows about public health and about the health of the American public," he added. "He just revealed how ignorant he is about the situation. We dont know how similar or dissimilar this is to the flu.
"We know one thing. It is actually more communicable than the flu. It passes between people very, very easily."
The comments came just moments after Trump announced that Vice President Pence would lead the administrations coronavirus response as he sought to bolster U.S. confidence in the White House's handling of the disease. The news conference on Wednesday night came amid warnings that an outbreak in the U.S. was "inevitable" and as lawmakers dubbed Trump's emergency funding request insufficient.