tl;dr- "directing them to coordinate all statements and public appearances with the office of Vice President Mike Pence"
> AP FACT CHECK: Democrats distort coronavirus readiness
> Democratic presidential contenders are describing the federal infectious-disease bureaucracy as rudderless and ill-prepared for the coronavirus threat because of budget cuts and ham-handed leadership by President Donald Trump. That’s a distorted picture. For starters, Trump hasn’t succeeded in cutting the budget.
> He’s proposed cuts but Congress ignored him and increased financing instead. The National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention aren’t suffering from budget cuts that never took effect.
However he did indeed cut the people tasked to deal with pandemics.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/01/31/coronavirus-china-trump...
> But other White House efforts included reducing $15 billion in national health spending and cutting the global disease-fighting operational budgets of the CDC, NSC, DHS, and HHS. And the government’s $30 million Complex Crises Fund was eliminated.
> In May 2018, Trump ordered the NSC’s entire global health security unit shut down, calling for reassignment of Rear Adm. Timothy Ziemer and dissolution of his team inside the agency. The month before, then-White House National Security Advisor John Bolton pressured Ziemer’s DHS counterpart, Tom Bossert, to resign along with his team. Neither the NSC nor DHS epidemic teams have been replaced. The global health section of the CDC was so drastically cut in 2018 that much of its staff was laid off and the number of countries it was working in was reduced from 49 to merely 10.
Without devolving into an inevitable political shouting match, what would the purpose of that move be?
Although, that's traditional thinking, and this president is anything but traditional. So maybe you're right.
https://thehill.com/homenews/media/485025-ap-fact-checkers-f...
https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/01/31/coronavirus-china-trump...
To satisfy it, the government has to show that it has a compelling state interest and that their solution is narrowly tailored to serve that interest.
Curfews for public safety after natural disasters like fires and floods, or to prevent spread of disease, or in times of extreme civil unrest like riots have been found to meet the strict scrutiny standard.
Since a ban on large gatherings is less of an imposition on your freedom of assembly than a curfew, I'd expect that it would be allowed.
Freedom of speech doesn’t mean you can falsely yell “active shooter” in a crowded theater.
Freedom to bear arms doesn’t mean you’re allowed to own nuclear weapon or a surface to air missile battery.
Freedom of assembly doesn’t mean you can go where you want, when you want.
Other needs and limits can preempt these “rights” so they’re not really right at all.
I hope I don't sound critical of this. I'm not. I'm in favor of empowering public health departments, with accountability and oversight and judicial review, to do what is needed to prevent massive tragedy. I'm just putting it bluntly: our case law on this topic is reasonably well-settled, and one-sided, as pertains to epidemics. (Now, as pertains to vaccinating...)