Former Bush White House medical advisor Dr. Jonathan Reiner called out Vice President Mike Pence’s “sycophantic” press conference on Friday and blasted President Donald Trump’s absence from the coronavirus task force briefing, during which he tweeted about Confederate statues.

During an appearance on CNN’s Erin Burnett Out Front, Reiner offered a bitter reaction to Pence’s Covid-19 briefing earlier on Friday, in which the vice president refused to wear a mask while defending high-risk indoor campaign rallies, urging “hope and prayer” to combat the pandemic, and tried to spin the current Covid-19 resurgence by citing “encouraging news.” Currently, nearly 30 states are seeing increasing coronavirus infection rates and, on Friday, the country set a new, single-day record with more than 40,000 positive cases.

“He did not attend the briefing, instead he was tweeting about those Confederate monuments,” Burnett noted of the president, before turning to Reiner. “So, you know, the vice president there was talking about all the ‘encouraging news,’ again, his words’ talking about coronavirus. So, what do you make of this? And specifically the president’s refusal to be there.”

“Yeah, the president in that tweet about the monuments seems to be more interested in protecting long-dead Confederate traitors than he is in protecting Americans right now,” Reiner said. “I was really appalled when the vice president today said, well, ‘We’ve all heard the encouraging news.’ The encouraging news, really? There have been 125,000 funerals. It’s the equivalent of three jumbo jets of Americans crashing every day, and we hear, ‘we’ve all heard the encouraging news.'”

“I want to hear the plan to fix this,” Reiner insisted. “The plan is social distancing, universal face masks, ramping up testing, and selective closing of municipalities when the virus is surging. That’s the plan, and that’s what our leaders should be saying to this public, not we’ve all seen the encouraging news. I’m really tired of this sycophantic bout.”

“It is stunning too that even when their own task force has said that masks are equivalent to a vaccine, the Vice President of the United States doesn’t even have the courage today to state the fact that people should be wearing masks. It’s the sort of thing that’s incensing.”

Watch the video above, via CNN.

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