WASHINGTON — When senior Food and Drug Administration officials held their morning call one day this week, they received a sobering warning from the agency’s chief, Dr. Stephen M. Hahn, who had just gotten off the phone with the White House: Block out “all the craziness” afoot and stay focused on fighting the pandemic, he said.

There are plenty of distractions. President Trump is pushing to overturn the results of the election and his only public statements about the coronavirus in the last few days were to make clear his pique that good news about a vaccine had not come until after Election Day — even as the number of new daily infections on Wednesday topped 140,000, average daily deaths shot past the 1,000 mark, and Covid-19 hospitalizations hit a record high of 65,368.

Brazil halted a late-stage trial of a Chinese vaccine on Monday that had been considered a global front-runner in the race to develop a protective shot for the coronavirus after a “serious adverse” reaction in a participant.

The decision provoked a political firestorm on Tuesday after President Jair Bolsonaro, who has been critical of China and spoken dismissively of its vaccine, CoronaVac, called the suspension a political victory.