Yesterday, we discussed how the media has long mocked the theory that the coronavirus originated at a lab in Wuhan that was researching not just coronaviruses but specifically naturally occurring bat-based viruses. Some have been discussing the obvious possibility that the lab, not the nearby market, was the source. Recently, it was disclosed that embassy officials in January 2018 alerted U.S. officials of serious problems in the lab which was conducting risky research on bats, the very source of COVID-19. China is known to have concealed the outbreak and arrested doctors trying to alert the world. Now key players in the diplomatic and intelligence community believe that indeed the Wuhan lab was the original source. There is however one member who continues to maintain that this crisis is due not to China but President Donald Trump: Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn).
Sen. Murphy declared on Anderson Cooper: “The reason that we’re in the crisis that we are today is not because of anything that China did, is not because of anything the WHO did. It’s because of what this president did. It’s because he didn’t take this virus seriously. We weren’t going to be able to keep every case out of the United States, but we didn’t have to have tens of thousands of people dying.”
What is clear is that China cost the world weeks of preparation when travel restrictions and enhanced production of material might have saved thousands of lives. There is certainly room to criticize the President for his early comments on the virus. However, there is a bizarre desire to shift the primary blame for this crisis from China to Trump. Given the cost of tens of thousands of lives and millions of cases, it is highly disturbing to read such comments.
Millions have contracted a virus because China not only arrested those who wanted to warn the world but buried needed research on the origins of the virus. That is putting aside the concern that the virus may have been released from the lab.
Once again, there is a legitimate debate if the White House did enough on the virus. I am still trying to work through those criticisms because it seems like we are speaking about a relatively short period of a couple weeks. However, none of that justifies the narrative that this is a crisis caused by Trump as opposed to the regime in China.
Allan, don’t acquire anz in your panz.
In the absence of a vaccine widespread testing is the only sensible alternative.
😷
How many tests are enough? Answer the question or admit you don’t know.
Let’s assume the vaccine doesn’t work or gets delayed for an additional year or two. Then what? Eventually I think we will end up with an on the spot test similar to pregnancy tests. However, in the meantime your kids and grandchildren’s futures are being destroyed.
David, Nancy Pelosi is playing politics. Below a fair editorial that you may not have seen because it is behind a paywall.
—
https://www.wsj.com/articles/moving-the-shutdown-goal-posts-11587078025
Moving the Shutdown Goal Posts
Liberals try to set Trump up to take the blame for any further coronavirus deaths.
Kimberley A. StrasselApril 16, 2020 7:00 pm ET
Speaker Nancy Pelosi in Washington, Feb. 6.
Photo: J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press
The shutdown came. The shutdown conquered. Long live the shutdown.
That’s the line congressional Democrats and liberal journalists are now adopting, as they set new battle lines in the pandemic debate. The Trump administration might have thought the hard call was shutting down the U.S. economy. The left intends to make reopening it far harder, lacing it with political risk by raising the bar for “success” to fantasy heights.
“Speaker Nancy Pelosi lashed President Donald Trump during a private call with her caucus Monday, saying he was putting Americans in grave danger if he rushes to reopen the economy at the end of this month,” reported Politico this week. The article laid out Mrs. Pelosi’s requirement: Until a robust “testing and contact tracing” system is in place, “it would be impossible for the president to guarantee Americans a safe reentry into their normal life.”
WSJ Opinion: The Coronavirus, America’s Response and the 2020 Election
The Covid-19 pandemic will cost thousands of lives and cause a sharp economic recession. WSJ Opinion’s Paul Gigot and Kimberley Strassel, with guests Marie Harf and columnist Karl Rove, joined “Opinion Live” on April 14th to discuss how America is mobilizing against this challenge, the social and economic lockdown, the response from business and governments, and the impact on the election.Click here to watch the Q&A Video replay.
Congressional Democrats are meanwhile debating their “own plan to reopen the nation,” said Politico, with legislation that would ask “each state to submit a plan” and that “would also require adequate testing and contact tracing to prevent a second outbreak.” The Washington Post reports that “Trump has been so insistent on the reopening that some officials worry only a narrow window exists to provide information to change his mind or to ensure that the effort to reopen does not significantly add to the country’s rising number of infections and deaths.”
By these standards, no lockdown may end until the Trump administration can “guarantee” a “safe” world in which people return to “normal.” The feds must stand up a testing system capable of hunting down and snuffing out each new infection. There can be no more outbreaks, and reopening cannot “significantly add” to existing counts (and the press reserves the authority to define “significantly.”) The unsaid corollary is that Mr. Trump will be held politically responsible for reopening in any way that fails to meet these baselines—on the hook for each subsequent death.
Talk about moving goal posts. A month ago, the administration announced its 15-day plan to “flatten the curve” and “slow the spread” of the virus. Examine those phrases. The goal of the shutdown was never to eradicate the disease—an impossibility absent a vaccine. The lockdown was designed to buy the health sector time, to make sure all the cases didn’t hit at once in a crush that would overwhelm hospitals, à la Italy.
In that regard, the Trump administration has become a victim of its own success. The guidelines did flatten the curve. As ugly as the outbreak has been, even New York City and other hot spots have had enough ventilators. Numerous emergency field hospitals ended up sitting empty. The lockdown has been so effective that it has allowed Mr. Trump’s political opponents to lay out a false narrative of what counts as “victory.”
The political cynicism is extraordinary. The liberal cognoscenti can read the scientific data as well as anyone; all of it makes clear this battle is far from over. While widespread testing may help, it won’t eradicate the virus. They also know even another month of lockdown, much less the year needed for a vaccine, would mean severe stress for the economy. Reopening must go forward, and that will by necessity mean more outbreaks, more cases, more deaths. That was always going to happen in a pandemic. Yet Mrs. Pelosi sees in this moment a political opportunity to pin the blame for the natural course of a disease on the White House.
The administration spent this week working on a plan for reopening, holding calls with business leaders and governors, and tapping experts for a new task force. It understands it needs to get this right. Come Election Day, Mr. Trump is likely to be judged more on the success of his efforts to get the economy back on track than on the shutdown itself. That means opening in a way that doesn’t instantly lurch the country into a second “peak infection” scenario, which would inspire calls for a second debilitating shutdown.
What’s missing from the White House reopening plan—and what is urgently required—is management of expectations. The administration needs to keep reminding the country of the original mission—to flatten the curve. And it needs to define quickly its own measure of success. That means explaining the limitations of even a wide-scale testing regime, preparing the country for continued rising death tolls, and warning that this virus is going to be with us for many months to come. It also means enlisting governors to help in delivering that message, as well as to share in the responsibility and rewards of reopening.
No politician likes to deliver hard truths, but that’s a far better strategy for this pandemic than stepping into the trap Democrats are laying.
Well written exposition:
https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2020/4/10/21209961/coronavirus-models-covid-19-limitations-imhe
🏥
Seth Warner & Allan — By checking Worldometer for the USA it is clear that nowhere near enough testing is being done. For every diagnosed new case, everybody that they have been close to for the past 16 days needs testing.
OK, David, tell us the right number of tests needed per day for that job? You don’t know. If we need too many tests then there are not enough people to trace the contacts. What do you do with those that are false negatives that have contacts as well? What do you do with all those people that are missed? You don’t seem to understand the process or the plan. Maybe you should familiarize yourself with it.
In the meantime take note that Paint Chips lies for the sake of lying. His intentions are to destroy Trump with lies though it matters little on this blog. What has he written that carries his name? There aren’t enough ventilators, but there were. Does that matter to him? No. What about hospital beds. His writing told us what a bad job Trump was doing but there were loads of empty beds. Understand that little of what Paint Chips says is true.
King Donald the Mad is one of the worst presidents ever:
https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/this-stunningly-detailed-timeline-of-trumps-failures-shows-americas-coronavirus-crisis-was-a-man-made-disaster/
Long.
My governor slams King Donald the Mad:
https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/governor-warns-trump-against-encouraging-supporters-to-disobey-the-law-on-lockdowns-words-can-be-fatal/
King Donald the Mad broke the law:
https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/legal-expert-trumps-liberate-tweets-incite-insurrection-and-thats-illegal/
Again.
Seth Warner — Yet Goebbels style Big Lie techniques may yet cause another term for King Donald the Mad.
👑
Murphy is a political hack. He has access to information about the decision making process in re travel bans and lock downs. For the rest of us Fauci made it crystal clear for all that Trump acted on the Fauci/Birx recommendations. If Murphy wants to claim that Trump did not act in a timely fashion he has to make the argument that following the medical teams’ recommendations is not appropriate.
https://youtu.be/2KnJmg6S7iw
The medical team is limited to what Trump will allow the federal government to do. Fauci cannot use the Defensive Products Act or declare other emergency actions to martial out nations power to get tests and other supplies where they are needed.
This failure is elementary and so basic as to be scandalous. Our “wartime President” is dodging the draft.
OPTICS LOOK BAD FOR TRUMP
Trump comes to office with no political experience, openly denies Russian interference, doubts Intelligence agencies, denies Climate Change, references ‘Deep State’, dismisses as ‘Fake News’ any headline he doesn’t like, chases career professionals from government, politicizes the U.S. Weather Bureau and attacks Public Workers Unions. All these actions look terrible when a pandemic cripples the world.
So it’s impossible to visualize any reason in the world that Trump deserves reelection.
” Fauci cannot use the Defensive Products Act or declare other emergency actions to martial out nations power to get tests and other supplies where they are needed.”
Follow the news. The number of tests is huge and the states are not using all the tests they have. Trump used the Defensive Products Acts but a lot of times persuasion is better than force. Trump has been successful in that arena. Think what happens when you try to force things together and they break when sometimes you could have just eased them together and it would work. We are producing more and more from a near dead stop. The Obama administration left too little. As Trump says we didn’t even have enough ammunition and when we needed to send ships off the shore of N. Korea in order to get a ship prepared we had to canabalize several others. That is how Obama left us vulnerable militarily and healthwise.
You are making things up as usual.
Alan, show us a mainstream story that says we’re “testing at a huge rate’. You won’t find it. The pace of testing is glacial.
Mainstream to you is the WP who uses unamed sources that turn out to be wrong. The states have a lot of equipment that isn’t being used.
With things changing so fast it’s hard to put an accurate fix on this but testing is not a cure and we have sufficient testing for the job at hand and more testing ability coming forward very quickly.
If we look at other claims we will see how exaggerated the MSM and the left has been. We were told we didn’t have enough ventilators or beds. Not one life was lost due to a lack of a ventilator though the press and Cuomo made us crazy. Cuomo wanted 40,000 ventilators but refused to buy 16,000 when he was told NYS was short 16,000 ventilators. When Trump sent him a huge supply of ventilators the claim was that Trump didn’t send enough even though a couple of thousand ventilators were sitting in a NY warehouse in NJ that Cuome didn’t know about. Until late Cuomo wasn’t using pressure to get unused ventilators from all over NY. Look at how the press jumped on Trump about the lack of ventilators and we never came close to running out.
Cuomo said they were running out of beds and was crying that they needed beds despite the fact that a couple of thousand were built for NY at the Javitz Center along with several other facilities. Not enough according to Cuomo and the MSM constantly screaming and crying. The President sent the hospital ship to NY Harbor to relieve NY of non Covid cases. The press slammed Trump for not doing enough and Curomo cried. Then Cuomo wanted the hospital ship converted to a Covid treatment center and Trump did that as well. Still the press never stopped and Cuomo cried despite the fact that Cuomo and the mayor of NYC didn’t live up to the expected maintainence of supplies in their own state and city. NYC hospitals suffered from overcrowding for years before Covid yet the press and NY officials blamed Trump when they have been at fault for years. Not only did the President supply beds but he supplied medical personal as well, not just on the ship but in NYC’s chronically overcrowded hospitals. NY is one of the most ungrateful states in the country.
It turns out that precious few beds were used at the Javits Center and the hospital ship was nearly empty. Hospital admissions declined with unused capacity I think in the many thousands. I didn’t hear the press complain about the fact that NY wanted all the federal government’s reserves when they didn’t need them willing to place the other 49 states in jeopardy. Pure greed and attacks on the President that had no basis. Pure lack of planning by those in NY that have had chronic shortages that they didn’t address.
We get back to testing. A lot of the testing used all over the world isn’t that good. We probably have the best testing anywhere and keep adding more. It would be nice to see what is actually available and unused but we don’t have that luxury at this time just like we didn’t have the luxury of knowing that we had sufficient ventilators and near sufficient hospital space when one takes into account NYC’s chonic overcrowding. Obama didnt leave us with much and was very big on outsourcing medical supplies and everything else that was needed for this emergency. Blame Obama and blame outsourcing too much.
It would be nice to have more testing capability but do we need it? It isn’t as importanat as you make it out. When polls are taken only a small number of people are interviewed to get the results. We have vastly more testing than we have for polls. If you understood these things you would recognize that you are looking in the dirt for an excuse to complain.
Exponential growth — simplest case:
Start with 1 bacterium or 1 yeast cell at time t0. At time t1, you have 2 cells. The interval t1-t0 is the doubling time. At time t2, you have 4 cells; at time t3, 8 cells, etc.
If you start with 2 cells at t0, then at t1 you have 4 cells, at t2 you have 8 cells, etc. In other words, it grows twice as fast. Start with 3 cells at t0, it grows 3 times as fast. Start with several thousand cells at t0, it grows several thousand times as fast.
On January 21, 10 days before the China travel ban and the 14 day quarantine for U.S. citizens returning from China, the first confirmed case of COVID-19 in the U.S. was reported. On January 24, 1 week before the travel ban, we first learned that COVID-19 was transmittable between humans.
On January 31, Trump issued a travel ban on people coming from China, against the advice of his advisors. Joe Biden and others called it ‘xenophobic’, ‘hysterical’ and, of course, ‘racist’. When Trump subsequently issued a European travel ban, Biden and others called it an over-reaction.
Had Biden been running things, and allowed several thousand infected people from China and Europe to enter the country and seed our population over the next month or so, the early projections of 1 to 2 million dead if we did nothing would have been a lot more realistic.
Then, of course, there was world-renowned epidemiologist Dr. Bill De Blasio saying in February, there is no cause for concern, come to New York city, go out to dinner, see a show, have a good time. How well did that work out? How well has that same attitude worked out for Italy?
Meanwhile, back in 2015, when Andrew Quomo’s medical task force warned him that New York would need an additional 17,000 ventilators in order to be adequately prepared for the next flu epidemic, he chose to do nothing. Now, New York’s lack of preparedness as a result of Quomo’s decisions is somehow Trump’s fault.
Orange Man Bad !!!
“That is your problem. You rely on MSM”
I am relying on reports coming out of China from the people of China. You can find those everywhere; on social media, in foreign news reports and in business reports, of which I gave you one example. And I did quote from the article.
The story you are trying to sell is just not believable. A nation can’t stop an epidemic dead in its tracks in under 3 weeks by lying to the population involved. The people involved know that the new infections reached a peak in the middle of February and they know by the first of March new infections had dropped to close to nothing. You can’t make the population believe that people are no longer becoming sick by just lying to them. There is no way that can work.
You can’t make the population believe that people are no longer becoming sick by just lying to them. There is no way that can work
It is paranoid and typical right wing conspiracy tropes to think China would hide numbers that would indicate hundreds or thousands of Chinese died. Can you imagine? Next these Trumptards will be saying China has hid the death of maybe a million people! Impossible!!
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/maos-great-leap-forward-killed-45-million-in-four-years-2081630.html
Mao’s Great Leap Forward ‘killed 45 million in four years’
Mr Dikötter, who has been studying Chinese rural history from 1958 to 1962, when the nation was facing a famine, compared the systematic torture, brutality, starvation and killing of Chinese peasants to the Second World War in its magnitude. At least 45 million people were worked, starved or beaten to death in China over these four years; the worldwide death toll of the Second World War was 55 million.
Mr Dikötter is the only author to have delved into the Chinese archives since they were reopened four years ago. He argued that this devastating period of history – which has until now remained hidden – has international resonance. “It ranks alongside the gulags and the Holocaust as one of the three greatest events of the 20th century…. It was like [the Cambodian communist dictator] Pol Pot’s genocide multiplied 20 times over,” he said.
Between 1958 and 1962, a war raged between the peasants and the state; it was a period when a third of all homes in China were destroyed to produce fertiliser and when the nation descended into famine and starvation, Mr Dikötter said.
“It is paranoid and typical right wing conspiracy tropes to think China would hide numbers that would indicate hundreds or thousands of Chinese died.”
________________________________________________________
That is correct. Back in 1918 the US govt was able to hide the vast number of deaths in the US because the govt prevented the newspapers from reporting it. It became known as the Spanish flu because Spain was one of the few places where there was accurate reporting of deaths. But Governments can’t get away with that anymore. There are millions of people in China communicating with millions of people outside of China and even more communications within China.
If China is reporting that new cases have dropped to less than 1 in a million every day and steadily falling the people will know if that is true or not. A nation cannot successfully lie its way out of an epidemic in today’s world of mass communication.
“A nation cannot successfully lie its way out of an epidemic in today’s world of mass communication.”
The MSM lied its way into (for a time) convincing large portions of the US that Trump was involved with Russia when it was really the Democrats and he wasn’t involved at all. At the same time while Trump was trying to decrease tensions between Russia and the US while improving our trading status and reducing the outsourcing of critical goods such as pharmaceuticals the MSM was slowing that down in an attempt to stop Trump’s rebalancing of America’s economy.
Suddenly we have this Covid epidemic that is likely to have come from the biologic lab in Wuhan. The Chinese lied to the world. WHO did not provide adequate information due to reasons not totally totally known but apparantly directly related to a close China relationship. Suddenly much of the MSM is blaming Trump for the Virus.
I would say that it might not be possible for a country to hide everything, it is possible for the MSM to destroy a lot of America by printing lies and supporting those that have close relationships in China while lying about others..
“The MSM lied its way into”
The US propaganda machine could well be more adept than in China but regardless neither the US or China can successfully lie its way out of an epidemic. A successful response has to be driven by good data.
The people of Wuhan know the facts about how this epidemic progressed. They know that it reached its peak in the middle of February and by the beginning of March they know that hardly any new cases were developing. The people of China are confident they were told the truth about what was happening and that the accurate data was a big part of the successful strategy of crushing the epidemic.
https://www.theautomaticearth.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/CrushTheCurve.jpg
” can successfully lie its way out of an epidemic.”
That doesn’t mean the MSM can’t fool a lot of Americans like they did with the Russia hoax, the Steele Dossier etc.
“The people of Wuhan know the facts about how this epidemic progressed.”
Do you really believe the uneducated “know” or have they heard stories and are not sure of what is or isn’t true?
“The people of China are confident they were told the truth about what was happening”
You might be confident but I can’t figure out how you draw such definite conclusions. More likely the people of China do what they are told and out loud they say what they are told. I don’t think any of us are capable of reading minds.
The Republicans are blessed to have
Fools like Murphy.
Its Trumps fault that Hilary didn’t get elected. Oh I’m not complaining.
Juan Cole lays it on thick:
https://www.juancole.com/2020/04/trumpism-tyrannical-stubborn.html
CDC estimates for the 2019-2020 flu season so far there have been
24,000 to 64,000 deaths.
Worldometer today states that from COVID -19 there have been
34,641 deaths
Murphy’s Law: “Anything that can go wrong, will.”
✈
DBB – story of my life. Haha 😂. You have no idea. But I am use to it now, and very comfortable with SHTF. I still complain sometimes, but yeah.
I like the Murphy’s law quote too, btw.
Peculiar that Murphy would hand potential opponents such richly decorated attack material.
His claim is preposterous and easily shown to be so.
Anyone running against him should use it every day against a backdrop of what Trump has done.
Do something like what Trump did to the media the other day.
Ram it down his throat and make him live and lose with it.
https://www.pourquoidocteur.fr/Articles/Question-d-actu/32184-EXCLUSIF-Pour-Pr-Montagnier-SARS-CoV-2-serait-virus-manipule-Chinois-l-ADN-de-VIH-podcast
wow wow wow
Isn’t this the great Patriot that met with Iran in secret? Representing the swamp? Not the USA this scum doesnt represent me. Can’t believe people actually vote for people like this guy…His neighbor Dirty DaNang Dick Blumenthal!! Can we not do better on both sides?
It’s Trump’s fault there is a global pandemic? It’s Trump’s fault that China hid their epidemic, allowing international travel, allowing it to spread around the world before admitting it, and then when they did, they lied again and claimed it does not transmit person to person?
Do people have amnesia and forget about when they called Trump racist and a fear monger for the travel restrictions?
Now, I disagree with Trump’s eagerness to reopen the economy. I’m glad he hasn’t done it yet, although I understand many people are desperate at this point.
But the virus is not Trump’s fault. To claim otherwise is simply partisanship.
When the CDC couldn’t come up with a test that worked, Trump threw it open to private industry, which came through. Companies re-tooled to turn out ventilator parts and masks.
What I would like to see happen soon is for N95 masks to be available to the public again soon. Millions have been produced and diverted to medical staff. We also need them available to the public.
This President didn’t create this virus, but he ignored it, denied it, minimized it, joked about it, weaponized it, politicized it, and exacerbated it. He is culpable for the chaos and the unnecessary illness, and yes, the preventable deaths because of it. And his supporters are too. This is the human cost of the MAGA cult delusion, and we’re all paying for it now equally.
Hear, hear, FishWings.
Damn that omniscient Donald plus he banned the most likely sufferers of it from coming to our shores. Too bad Europe didn’t follow suit.
Of course you didn’t check the numbers coming from China after Trump’s so-called ban. Why do the facts bother Trump supporters so bad.
Make that up all by yourself?
Over 400,000 came in from China after the “ban”.
Dear god, have you no eyes to see/ears to hear?
Have you got any bites? That bait seems rancid. Your legions of parasites will scarf up anything that facilitates their acquisition of “free stuff” and their ability to kill babies, right?
He didn’t ignore it. He enacted travel bans. Created a task force. Imposed restrictions. Threw open testing manufacture to private labs when the CDC failed. Coordinated providing N95 masks to medical staff. Aided the states. Even Cuomo and Newsom have admitted that Trump has done everything in his power to help them, and been instantly responsive to their requests.
A global pandemic is not Trump’s fault. It’s not Trump voters’ fault.
Theres seems to be no low too far in partisanship. Blaming Trump voters for a global pandemic.
President Trump is not an epidemiologist. Initial symptoms for Covid-19 are flulike symptoms. (As an aside, most dread diseases start with flulike symptoms. That’s why microbio class makes everyone a hypochondriac for a few months after the class ends.) That is why so many referred to it as some sort of flu like illness.
He has said that we’re going to be OK. He doesn’t want anarchy. I disagree with him over his eagerness to restart the economy, as I feel we need to wait for N95s and proper treatment available. But to claim that this plague is Trump’s fault is beyond the pale armchair quarterbacking.
The issue is he’s tried to blame everyone including Obama for this, when he dismantled Obama’s pandemic response initiative. He admittedly refused to let a cruise full of Americans land and be quarantined at a base so that he could keep the numbers artificially lower by treating them as not part of any nation currently under the law of the seas. He put up a non effective ban and didn’t take proper steps to plan for testing so it’s taken us over 2 months to test 3.1 million or less than1%of the population & nothings changing
this is definitely on Obama….and Bush
elsewhere I explained why
What crap. Admittedly? That cruise ship was always counted as US among the those paying attention. He didnt dismantle anything. The team studying pandemics had grandfathered out of funding and in Washington it was abdorbed. We had our core including Fauci (who has been wrong on this) still existed. Do you think Cuomo or Trump are epidemiologists? None of this happens in a bubble, and our leaders respond in ways sanctioned by our exoerts. This is not a ‘Trump doctrine’ or Newsom or Cuomo for that matter. They institute best guess guidelines. Trump can be faulted for not replenishing stockpiles, but the same could be said for Obama after the Bush administration urged replenishment of N95 masks after H1N1. Cuomo was advised we would need more ventilators years ago should this happen and he chose not to allocate resources. DiBlasio like let his stocks of ventilators fall into disrepair so they had to be scrapped. I am not excoriating them because this was unforseen blessed as many things are. I don’t like Trump bUT he has performed as well as any. BTW, he was right about NY and it’s needs. When I say he, I mean his experts. NY is shipping excess ventilators to Maryland. As far as ineffective bans, we are being ravaged by the European variant of the virus. Can you begin to imagine if we had borne the brunt of the Chinese variant as well if Trump didn’t enact the Chinese travel ban so early? Ask Italy how that has been going. Of course Trump is at fault for hand assembling those shit CDC test kits with bad reagents. Please people stop politicizing every bowel movement.
@anonymous. Admittedly because he stated “ like the numbers being where they are. I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship” and made it fairly clear it was about the actual number and not the risk of spread https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/03/07/which-is-trump-more-worried-about-coronavirus-numbers-or-coronavirus-patients/
Cutting funding and axing a team without replacing them isn’t the same as funding simply running out https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-fire-pandemic-team/
And Fauci has been around since the HW Bush days running the NIH. He’s not a holdover from the Obama era, he was appointed in January to lead the task force. One of the few moved I must applaud trump for (though he seems to contemplate firing him).
My post was in response to Karen S and others trying to prop Trump up to be some savior. The China ban would have been worth praising if it didn’t allow half a million people to fly in from China after it was enacted. You had people let in reporting symptoms on their passport forms, and still not being tested. The article is about someone claiming trump is the source of the virus, and while he isn’t the source we’re allowed to weigh on whether he should have any accountability for its spread in the US, the bungled testing in the US and the deaths in the US.
If we applaud Merkel for Germany breaking the curve by enacting testing in large numbers, so too should Trump be criticized for pushing CDC actions resulting in failure to test and the fact that after more than 2 months less than 1 percent of the population has been tested. I’d rather we destroy covid and trump get re-elected than the virus continue to ravage our country, but he and the Fox News pushes hoax theory is making destroying covid a more difficult prospect FYI.
“And Fauci has been around since the HW Bush days running the NIH. He’s not a holdover from the Obama era, he was appointed in January to lead the task force. One of the few moved I must applaud trump for (though he seems to contemplate firing him).”
CK, since you like Fauci who do you think holds the largest portion of blame for the faulty test kits? Wouldn’t Fauci’s name rise to the top of the list and the President’s name be at the bottom?
I don’t blame the president for the faulty test kit. Mistakes happen and that was beyond his control, and while he could have opted to use the WHO test kits over having the cdc produce their own, the first batch being ruined and taking weeks to replace wasn’t entirely foreseeable. I blame him for the policy that hospitals had to wait for the next batch of cdc test kits when they had test kits.:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/rachelsandler/2020/03/02/how-the-cdc-botched-its-initial-coronavirus-response-with-faulty-tests/
I blame him for the time lost. And I’m sure he would blame Obama for the 18 tons of PPE sent as a gift to China when he had reason to know we’d be needing it soon. You can’t say it was up to the states to order PPE and the federal govt has no hand in it when as soon as the states try to order PPE and have contracts to do so the feds supersede them, swoop in and take what’s there.
You claim I’m politicizing this but don’t have a single word for Trump’s constant politicization
https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-blasts-new-coronavirus-message-liberate-swing-states-with-democratic-governors-173030851.html
CK07, I’m sure you know we can and should be analyzing who did and didn’t do what during the crisis – including the Chinese – but while it is still a crisis we should be focusing on what still needs to be done and helping each other on that – including the Chinese who we continue to rely on and they us. What is so upsetting about Trump is that his dysfunction is continuing and daily and an impediment to our response.
Lead the MFing country. Use the powers only you have and stop the chaotic PPE and test kit auctions and get our resources working together. He spends most of his daily briefings stroking himself, pointing fingers, and avoiding responsibility. Put Pence in charge, let him use your levers, and get out of the way.
“I don’t blame the president for the faulty test kit”
Good.
“while he could have opted to use the WHO test kits over having the cdc produce their own,”
Bad.
The WHO wouldn’t be supplying test kits to the US. They don’t do that. They might supply to third world nations. By the way WHO never developed a test kit
However, if it had happened (it didn’t) then that would have been in the domain of the CDC and the FDA. Who do you think would then hold a large amount of responsibility? Wouldn’t it be Fauci?
However, Trump did break the stranglehold of the FDA so that private labs could create testing and that is how we got so many tests done after the failure. Trump opened opened up the marketplace something that Obama was trying to shut down.
“I blame him for the time lost” [Trump]
What time lost? You mean the time when Fauci and the rest were saying that there was no need for a travel ban? You mean the time while the Democrats and media were focused on impeachment and calling the President names and accusing him of racism?
Maybe you should be blaming Fauci, the MSM and the Democrats. Fauci later admitted Trump was right and saved a huge number of lives. Neither the Democrats nor the MSM made such statements. They just lied.
“18 tons of PPE sent as a gift to China ”
Who were those people that sent the PPE to China? Obama and Biden’s friends? certainly not friends of Trump and not likely that they voted for Trump. Who has had dealings in China with money changing hands? The Biden family and a lot of others. I think a large portion of Bloomberg’s fortune comes from China. Do you think he voted for Trump?
You never did answer the question asked in a direct fashion.
“CK, since you like Fauci who do you think holds the largest portion of blame for the faulty test kits? Wouldn’t Fauci’s name rise to the top of the list and the President’s name be at the bottom?”
He said “15 cases would soon be 0”. He called COVID-19 a “hoax”. He said it would “magically disappear” by April. He said we would have a vaccine “very quickly”. He said Hydrochloroquine was a “game changer”. All lies, and known to be lies when he said them, solely because he thought he could stop the stock market free-fall that was coming. All for political reasons. This downplaying of the seriousness of this pandemic and his lying have cost lives. More significantly, his utter incompetence and lack of leadership has cost lives, jobs and has decimated the robust economy Obama created. States are on their own to compete with one another for PPE, ventilators and supplies.
He proclaimed himself king by claiming he has absolute power to command states to open up schools, businesses and sports venues, all the while disavowing responsibility for coordinating distribution of needed supplies and equipment. He specifically said: “I take no responsibility”.
Cuomo and Newsom know that unless you kiss his plus-sized ass, Trump will withhold money, ventilators, supplies, etc.. Trump has even sent ventilators to Mikey Pence’s home state, Indiana, which doesn’t need them because their ICU beds are only 44% occupied. Trump has said he expects gratitude to be shown for allowing taxpayers to have the equipment and supplies their tax money paid for. He leverages these supplies just like he tried to leverage aid to Ukraine. He can’t be gone too soon.
and you be full of it
Show your work.
Had not the president acted quickly by banniing travel from China, we would be dealing with two fronts. Even Fauci, (our top expert on infectious dusease) said in February that it was a miniscule threat. I am amazed how the ill infirmed think that any president (or any leader ) develops his own custom response to a crisis. Our respose to Katrina was terrific, despite what the media would have you believe: https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/noel-sheppard/2006/03/06/popular-mechanics-takes-katrina-myths
He assembled a team and has been dealing with it while the media said:
Washington Post article in February said, “Get a grippe, America. The flu is a much bigger threat than coronavirus, for now.” On March 4, CNN’s Anderson Cooper said, “if you’re freaked out about the Coronavirus you should be more concerned about the flu.” CNN wrote, “Why are some fears misguided? While the novel coronavirus has infected more than 75,000 people” worldwide, “it’s caused far fewer deaths than the flu … since the novel coronavirus was first detected in the United States in January, 15 people have been diagnosed with the illness as of Wednesday. None of them has died.” The Daily Beast wrote that “coronavirus, with zero American fatalities, is dominating headlines, while the flu is the real threat.”