Kudlow’s Claim About COVID-19 Spread

Despite early warnings about how damaging COVID-19 could be for Americans, White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow defended his late February statement that the U.S. had “contained” the virus, saying on May 3 that the novel coronavirus “spread exponentially in ways that virtually no one could have predicted.”

In just one example, news organizations reported that President Donald Trump’s top trade adviser, Peter Navarro, wrote a memo in late January advising federal officials that the global outbreak could become a pandemic and that more than half a million Americans could die in multiple scenarios. Navarro then wrote another memo dated Feb. 23, saying the illness could claim the lives of 1 million to 2 million Americans, the news reports, which included images of the memos, said.

Kudlow, the director of the National Economic Council, made the claim May 3 in an interview with Jake Tapper on CNN’s “State of the Union.” On the show, Kudlow defended having previously declared in a Feb. 25 CNBC interview that the U.S. had “contained” the coronavirus “pretty close to airtight.”

Tapper, May