A member of the White House coronavirus task force has told NPR that President Donald Trump has not met with them "for quite some time," and suggested that he was more focused on campaigning for his reelection than attending meetings about the pandemic.

Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes for Health (NIH) said that Trump is mainly getting his updates from Vice President Mike Pence and fellow task force member Dr.

Neither Pence nor Atlas are infectious-disease experts.

"So, yeah, there's not a direct connection between the task force members and the president as there was a few months ago.

The remarks underline the growing influence of Atlas with the president over other experts on the task force.

Redfield was overheard saying last month that "everything" Atlas said "is false," while Fauci has said that he worried about Atlas passing misleading information to the president