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President Donald Trump and his allies in conservative media have subtly scaled down their hyping of hydroxychloroquine as a potential cure for the coronavirus, according to a POLITICO review of White House briefings and cable news coverage. Although Trump had repeatedly promoted the decades-old malaria drug since the early days of the disease’s outbreak in the United States, his public statements regarding hydroxychloroquine have diminished significantly over the past week for reasons that remain unclear. (Forgey, 4/20)

As the coronavirus pandemic emerged, President Trump quickly sought to compare his performance to the pandemic that appeared in 2009 under the watch of his predecessor, Barack Obama. He called it a “big failure” and a “debacle,” compounded by “horrific mistakes.” He railed about the death toll, often inflating the figures to 17,000, as he did in this recent tweet. These criticism might have had some resonance back when there appeared to be relatively few cases in the United States. On March 4, when Trump first attacked Obama’s handling of the swine flu, there were only about 100 reported cases of covid-19 in the United States. (Kessler, 4/21)

The Trump administration took Surgeon General Jerome Adams off television last week after his controversial remarks on Covid-19's threat to minorities, silencing the White House's loudest voice on racial disparities even as concerns mount about risks to communities of color. Adams made just one TV appearance last week, a steep decline from the 10-plus TV appearances he made the prior week on programs like ABC's "Good Morning America,” CBS’ “This Morning” and NBC’s “Today Show." (Diamond, 4/20)

Francis Collins hasn’t set foot on the National Institutes of Health’s campus in Bethesda, Md., for the last month. But the NIH director says he’s working harder than he has in his nearly five decades in science — never rising later than 5 a.m. and rarely stopping work before 10 p.m. to make sure the $39 billion biomedical research agency continues to function during the coronavirus pandemic. (Facher, 4/21)

When Maria Van Kerkhove sat before a room full of reporters on Jan. 14, she admits she was a little nervous. As the newly appointed technical lead in charge of a key pillar of the World Health Organization's (WHO) response to a coronavirus outbreak that was beginning to spread in China, it was her first experience talking to a media scrum hungry for answers. Three months later, Van Kerkhove, 43, looks like the savvy veteran. (Wilson, 4/20)