"We're facing a public health epidemic," David Kessler, who led the FDA under Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton and is now advising former Vice President Joe Biden on the coronavirus, told POLITICO. "If FDA is not looking at validation studies, then FDA is not doing its job."

President Trump’s schedule is so packed amid the coronavirus crisis that he sometimes skips lunch, his aides told The Post — refuting a report that the commander-in-chief spends his days obsessing over TV coverage and eating fries.

White House staffers said the president works around the clock and can make five dozen work-related calls a day during the pandemic.



He said Trump recently called him at 3:19 a.m. He wasn’t expecting the call and was asleep when the phone rang.

“I can tell you that he will go back in and have a lunch just off the Oval Office and more times than not it is interrupted by several phone calls,” Meadows said. “If he gets more than 10 minutes of time in a given day, I haven’t seen in the five weeks I’ve been here.”

A different White House official said Trump some days doesn’t eat lunch.

“There are times when lunch isn’t even a thought,” the official said. “A lot of time there’s either no time for lunch or there is 10 minutes for lunch.”

An account in the New York Times that claimed Trump lingers in his bedroom as late as noon infuriated the president, who tweeted Sunday, “I will often be in the Oval Office late into the night & read & see that I am angrily eating a hamburger & Diet Coke in my bedroom.”

“I work from early in the morning until late at night,” the president tweeted.

“As the Department of Justice explained recently in guidance to states and localities taking steps to battle the pandemic, even in times of emergency, when reasonable and temporary restrictions are placed on rights, the First Amendment and federal statutory law prohibit discrimination against religious institutions and religious believers,” wrote Barr. “The Constitution also forbids, in certain circumstances, discrimination against disfavored speech and undue interference with the national economy.”

“If a state or local ordinance crosses the line from an appropriate exercise of authority to stop the spread of COVID19 into an overbearing infringement of constitutional and statutory protections, the Department of Justice may have an obligation to address that overreach in federal court,” continued Barr. “I am therefore directing the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, Eric Dreiband, and Matthew Schneider; the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan, to oversee and coordinate our efforts to monitor state and local policies and, if necessary, take action to correct them.”

Even though I’ve taken time to process, I am still so angered by the protests across the country that I feel the need to speak up.

I have largely stayed away from COVID posts, despite it consuming the rest of my life. I’m not looking for a debate, or even affirmation for my views. I know I may not change any minds, but those who express their opinions need to allow me a platform to safely express mine.

I want to make this clear: I am in no way opposed to people’s right to protest. I definitely don’t want to see my husband and so many friends out of work. No one wants to see businesses go under or families lose their homes. I know that I am not in the same boat as so many others, but I also don’t want to keep seeing refrigeration trucks outside of hospitals to hold the overflow of bodies. I support the slow reopening of businesses as soon as appropriate safety measures are in place. Although vague, the White House has already laid out recommendations for opening the country that make sense, and our state is nowhere near ready for phase one.

This is why these protests were so incredibly counter-productive. There were people wearing MAGA hats that clearly hadn’t read the recommendations that came from Trump’s office. Although it was taken down, there was a confederate flag flying. There was a woman holding a sign that read “I want a haircut.”

A more productive protest would have been 1000 people, each spaced ten feet apart, and wearing face coverings, to demonstrate that we are ready for at least one of the core state preparedness responsibilities set out.

What a lot of the protestors forgot is they can’t reopen and run their business if they are sick at home, or hospitalized, or dead. They will have to shut down again if an outbreak happens at their workplace because precautions weren’t in place, and we don’t yet have the ability to track those at risk. The bills an owner or employee could receive from a COVID-19 hospitalization may be far larger than the revenue generated or income made from reopening a business before the state is ready.

That is why, when I saw the protests, I feared the extra time it might take to reopen businesses because of the second wave of COVID-19 that may result from so many people in close contact. I thought about the influx of sick patients we are going to see in the hospital because people were not maintaining their distance or wearing masks.

If these individuals were brazen enough to do this publicly, I’m sure they are not adhering to the guidelines in their day to day lives, either. I thought about the heartbreak that patients and family members are going through being separated during hospitalizations or ICU stays. I thought about my colleagues across the country who fear they could run out of the ventilators they need to save as many people as they can.

359 days ago, I was in an ICU bed fighting for my life on a ventilator. One week earlier, I was considered a “healthy young woman.” I wonder how many other “low risk” people just haven’t found out that they are living with a condition that actually makes them high risk.

The biggest difference between one year ago and now, is that hospitals then were fully equipped with the resources to take care of me. The treatments for my condition were well-established. I was able to be surrounded by family and friends. I was not alone.

If you are uncomfortable seeing someone intubated in an ICU bed, stay at home. Just because you can’t enter a hospital to see what is happening, doesn’t mean we are exaggerating the circumstances.

I have heard people say that those who support stay at home orders are just scared and living in fear. How dare you. That is trashing all the hospital workers who are stepping onto the frontlines every single day. So many hospital employees also have an “and.” I am a physician and a cancer survivor. I finished chemotherapy four months ago, and yes, I worry that every day I walk into the hospital or clinic is the day I will be exposed. But I still go to work. If we removed all the medical workers who have an “and,” we wouldn’t have enough physicians to fight this infection. We wouldn’t have enough nurses to take care of you if you become sick.

For those who say the flu kills more people, H1N1 killed more people, or heart disease/cancer/other non-communicable diseases kills more people … for the last ten years, influenza has killed 12,000-61,000 US citizens annually. H1N1 killed 12,500 US citizens in one year at the peak of the outbreak — and there were antivirals that were effective at treating it.

Deaths from substance abuse, cancer, and heart disease do not happen because you had a bonfire with your friends to celebrate the start of spring. The death toll for COVID-19 is 35,000 in just three months. There are no well-proven treatments. Our only defense is to slow the spread. Maybe the same number of people will get sick over a longer period of time, but maybe a better treatment will be found that will save lives. Do you want to see the full damage COVID can do if it is allowed to spread unchecked so that life can “go back to normal”?

We are unfortunately very accustomed to the annual deaths from x, y, and z, but right now “bombs” of COVID have gone off across the country, leading to a previously-unanticipated loss of life. How many lives would be cut short if we reopen the country without diffusing the rest of the bombs? What economic burden on society would be created by years of potential productive life lost and cost of productivity lost?

We went to war over the deaths caused by 9/11, but now that this war has to be fought within the borders of our country and it’s not just soldiers being asked to make sacrifices, it’s “too much” and a “threat to freedom.”

The estimated death rate for COVID-19 is as high as three percent. Yes, this rate may be lower if we were able to test everyone to truly see how many people have asymptomatic infections, but the US population is around 330 million and we do not have 330 million tests. If you are so desperate for all businesses to reopen that you are willing to risk the lives of three friends, family members, or acquaintances for every 100 people you know, I feel sorry for you. I will pray for the lives of those people that you are willing to sacrifice.

So to all of you who supported me during my cancer treatment but now would rather put my family and me at unnecessary risk, please respectfully keep your comments away from me, unfriend me on social media — or don’t be surprised if you notice that I have unfriended you first.

KING: You’re a senator, but you’re also Dr. Cassidy, and I’m interested in your perspective. If you look at Google searches this past week, after the president talked about sunlight and using possibly using disinfectants, you see a spike in searches there for”inject yourself with disinfectant.” One of the highest states where those searches spiked was yours, sir, the state of Louisiana, which has been incredibly hard hit by COVID-19, and where the president has a very loyal base.

We’re in the position this past week where the Centers for Disease Control and U.S. Surgeon General had to put out public statements, essentially saying, and this is my translation, don’t listen to the president, be careful here.

As a doctor, what goes through your mind when the president dispenses medical advice and have you ever thought about picking up the phone and saying, sir, please, don’t?

CASSIDY: The president speaks in such a way — people are not going to inject themselves, and when I hear this kind of conversation around that, I think to myself, we should be talking about how do we use data to guide where we can reopen the economy, not about what the president said on Lysol, because, really, no one is going to inject themselves with Lysol.

KING: But, I'm sorry, I just need to interrupt here. I hope you’re right sir, but, f you talk to the — on the Maryland hotline, they got a lot of phone calls. You see these searches here. He at least puts the nugget in people’s minds. If he hadn’t mentioned it, those searches don’t happen, those phone calls don’t happen, the time is not wasted and we can get to the point you’re trying to make.

CASSIDY: So, we can talk about Lysol, if you want to, John. We really can. What we should be talking about is how do we use data in order to keep people safe and reopen an economy. Now, we can talk about searches, or we can talk about R0. R0 is the rate of the transmissibility of a virus, if we lower it less than 1, we can reopen an economy safely. Now, that’s not Lysol. Maybe that doesn't kind of light up a headline, but it is what opens our economy, and frankly, that’s what I'm focused on.

KING: Sir, that's what I'd love to focus on, but we also do have to cover the president of the United States when he says things.

“We have risen to the challenge of this pandemic and found a way to forge something positive for our children,” said the mayor of Detroit, Mike Duggan, as reported by local outlet Click On Detroit. “This will be a defining moment of pride in Detroit for many, many years.”