This weekend, CNN’s Jake Tapper did an excellent interview with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi where he drilled down on one of the most glaring contradictions in the Democratic narrative against President Donald Trump. Pelosi and other Democrats excoriated Trump for his order to block travel from China on January 30th. Pelosi was also in late February calling for people to mass in Chinatown in San Francisco to protest Trump’s comments and actions on China. Now, however, Pelosi is saying the problem was that the travel ban did not go far enough?
The Democrats have been struggling to negate the fact that Trump’s action in January counteracts the criticism that he did nothing, particularly when even that action was opposed by Democrats. Interviews on Sunday were damaging in a number of ways for that effort. In a different interview on Face the Nation, Mayor London Breed also tried to downplay the value of the travel ban by suggesting that she and other were already acting in December and declared an emergency in February. She then added that it is good that Chinatown “basically was a ghost town” in January.” While she referenced the “zenophobia” cited by Pelosi, she appeared to say that it was fortunate that no one was gathering in Chinatown. However in late February, Pelosi was encouraging people to mass in Chinatown.
Tapper’s interview pressed the point. When the order was imposed, Pelosi was publicly and vehemently opposed to even the notion of a ban: ‘‘The Trump Administration’s expansion of its outrageous, un-American travel ban threatens our security, our values and the rule of law.”
Now however the order was not racist, but too little too late: “Tens of thousands of people were still allowed in from China. It wasn’t as it is described as this great moment. … If you’re going to shut the door because you have an evaluation of an epidemic, then shut the door”
CNN Politics
✔@CNNPolitics
Speaker Pelosi on Trump’s China travel restriction: “Tens of thousands of people were still allowed in from China. It wasn’t as it is described as this great moment. … If you’re going to shut the door because you have an evaluation of an epidemic, then shut the door” #CNNSOTU
Breaking!!!!
“One of the Dems’ Most Influential Political Operatives Is Under Investigation
One of the Democratic Party’s most prominent and influential political operatives, David Brock, is currently being investigated for tax fraud, TheBlaze reported. According to an IRS complaint, Brock allegedly transferred more than $2.7 million from his non-profit organization, American Bridge Foundation, to True Blue Media, a for-profit left-wing news organization he founded. True Blue Media is the parent company of the for-profit media website known as The American Independent (which was previously called ShareBlue).
The transfers were discovered in Form 990 filings with the IRS from 2017 and 2018 and the complaint was filed by the conservative watchdog group called Patriots Foundation.
Interestingly enough, in 2017, Brock laid out his plans for taking down President Donald Trump. And he mentioned his companies in the process:
From The Daily Beast:
The nonprofit at issue is the American Bridge 21st Century Foundation, and it’s part of a constellation of entities that Brock has seeded over the years and which he tasked in early 2017 to, in his words, “kick Donald Trump’s ass.” The foundation is the “dark money” affiliate of AB PAC, a super PAC that is pouring millions of dollars into an effort to defeat Trump in November.
Brock’s network also includes a for-profit news venture called the American Independent. That outlet is owned by a company he formed in late 2015 called True Blue Media LLC. When Brock convened donors at a retreat in early 2017 to brief them on his anti-Trump efforts going forward, he billed True Blue Media’s news operation explicitly as a revenue-generating enterprise that would sell advertising and subscriptions.
Over the next two years, American Bridge’s nonprofit arm invested more than $2.6 million in True Blue Media, according to tax filings. Those filings list Brock’s ownership stake in the LLC as greater than 35 percent. The structure appears to have resembled a convertible note; in exchange for that cash infusion, American Bridge was promised future equity in the media company. It’s not clear if that equity was ever provided.
townhall
Oh, that useful idiot
REGARDING ABOVE:
This is our stupid Anonymous who’s incapable of analyzing news stories. A complaint was filed with the IRS by an Iowa- based rightwing non-profit. That doesn’t necessarily mean the IRS is conducting an investigation, nor does it mean that any indictments are pending. It simply means that a pro-Trump group calling themselves ‘Patriot’ something has filed a complaint.
The following excerpt is from The Blaze:
American Bridge President Bradley Beychok said the group’s “investment” was authorized by the board of directors. “The investment in True Blue Media, LLC was determined by the Independent Board of Directors to further the mission of AB Foundation,” Beychok told The Daily Beast.
“To remove any potential conflict of interest, David Brock resigned as an officer and a member of the board of directors [of American Bridge] in 2016, before the first investment was made,” Beychok said. “In the interest of transparency, the investments were listed on IRS form 990 as both a grant on Schedule I and on Schedule L. AB Foundation received an industry-standard investment agreement and in turn owns stock in True Blue Media.”
Edited From: ” Top Dem Operative And Founder Of Media Matters Accused Of Illegally Profiting From Far Left Non-Profit”
The Blaze, 4/25/20
You are just following Daddy’s orders
Conservative Columnist Notes Trouble Signs For Trump
Columnist Henry Olson fears Senate Republicans will try to distance themselves from Trump based on ominous polls. Olson believes Republicans should do just the opposite and stand firmly behind Trump. Yet Olson opens his column with these 3 paragraphs:
………………………………………………..
Republican strategists are increasingly worried that President Trump’s poor approval numbers will drag down the entire party this fall. Rather than try to distance themselves from him, though, the data suggest they should do something unconventional: Run the Trump reelection campaign that he won’t.
Polling increasingly shows that Trump’s unpopularity is deep and widespread. His national job approval rating is at 45.6 percent as of Monday morning, well below the level he needs to eke out a small victory in the electoral college. Moreover, state polling shows he is below 50 percent approval in battleground states such as Wisconsin and Florida. This figure is especially troubling for GOP strategists because people are increasingly voting for all offices based on how they view Trump.
The nation has been trending toward straight, party-ticket voting for many years. The Pew Research Center found in 2018 that Senate races increasingly had been won by the party that also won that state in the most recent presidential race. Stephen Wolf of Daily Kos Elections found a similar correlation in results for the U.S. House. The 2018 midterms results were even more heavily correlated to Trump support. Both the exit polls and pre-vote analysis based on the New York Times-Siena College polling show that support for Republican Senate and House candidates was closely related to Trump job approval.
Edited From: “Republicans Have To Run Campaign Trump Won’t Run”
Today’s Washington Post
Travel Ban Was Proposed By Azar, Redfield And Fauci. Trump Was Initially Skeptical
By Thursday, Jan. 30, the public health officials had come around. Mr. Azar, Dr. Redfield and Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, agreed that a ban on travel from the epidemic’s center could buy some time to put into place prevention and testing measures. “There was so much we didn’t know about this virus,” Dr. Redfield said in an interview. “We were rapidly understanding it was much more transmissible, that it had a great ability to go global.”
The debate moved that afternoon to the Oval Office, where Mr. Azar and others urged the president to approve the ban. “The situation has changed radically,” Mr. Azar told Mr. Trump.
Others in the room urged being more cautious, arguing that a ban could have unforeseen consequences. “This is unprecedented,” warned Kellyanne Conway, the president’s counselor. Mr. Trump was skeptical, though he would later claim that everyone around him had been against the idea. The two countries were in delicate trade negotiations. Was this the time to provoke China? he asked. And what about the consequences on the economy?
The president sided with his more aggressive aides, and announced the ban next day.
Still, Mr. Trump was publicly upbeat about the effects of the virus. At a campaign rally in New Hampshire in early February, as the World Health Organization was announcing new cases by the tens of thousands, he said of the coronavirus, “By April, you know, in theory, when it gets a little warmer, it miraculously goes away.”
In fact, the fight against the virus was already beginning to stumble.
A system used to track travelers returning from China went offline just as state officials were told to begin monitoring them. Mr. Azar said at a congressional hearing that he needed at least 300 million respirator masks for health care workers, but the national emergency stockpile, the government’s reserve of disaster supplies, held only 12 million, and many of those had expired.
And a C.D.C. coronavirus test distributed to state labs had a flawed component that led to sometimes inconclusive results, crippling the nation’s testing capacity for weeks, despite assurances by the administration that it was quickly being resolved.
Edited From: “Inside The Administration, Debate Raged Over What To tell The Public”
The New York Times, 3/9/20
REGARDING ABOVE:
Trump announced the travel ban on January 31. Yet publicly he continued dismissing the virus threat all through February.
Unfortunately for myself as a continuing supporter of Mr Trump, this is a good point that Seth regurgitates from the NYT
And he should have slammed the door on European travel.
Among the dungheap of insults and exagerrations from the mainstream media, this one observation is keenly relevant in an objective appraisal of the virus response.
I wish POTUS Trump the best in making good decisions going forwards.
“Travel Ban Was Proposed By Azar, Redfield And Fauci. Trump Was Initially Skeptical”
That’s strange because Fauci said the opposite.
March 11, 2020: Why is there such a disparity in cases and deaths between the west coast and NewYork?
https://ny.eater.com/2020/3/11/21175497/coronavirus-nyc-restaurants-safe-dine-out
West coast shut down a week plus before east coast that is the overriding factor.
The answer you seek is in the actions of China which closed and protected military bases and Wuhan but allowed flights out of Wuhan for an absurd period of time. Destinations likely reflect COVID patterns. Either those flights were weapons delivery systems or complete idiocy.
Add to that the Cuomo Administration (NY) had Covid + cases returned to nursing homes despite objections.
I’ll leave the switching seats on the Titanic argument to those trying to combat their guilt about supporting a president who so miserably failed in pandemic response…
Take home point: whether Trump got a Chinese traveler ban or not, and who supported it, are sleights of hand…, Trump did the absolute minimal in responding to CV-19, lied about its possibilities repeatedly, never properly activated the DPA for supplies and testing, turned his pressers into freak shows, suggested injecting bleach as a possible treatment…
He is a failed president just on this one issue alone and history will honor him as such.
And the virus hit the U.S. harder than any country in the world. As it stands today, nearly 1/3 of all the cases on the planet are in the U.S. This week,we’ll surpass the Viet Nam war in deaths and Trump’s going to lose in November because while flyover might not GAF if Trump shoots someone on 5th Ave they sure as hell care about him shooting grandpa in the kitchen.
The uninformed writing above tells us that this anonymous should read more and post less. Repetition of talking points is not an indication of knowledge or intelligence.
But the posting of truth shows an indication of sanity.
Linking one’s character to one that has proven himself both stupid and a liar (Anon) isn’t an intelligent thing to do.
I’ll leave the character assasination to you.
Seems as if you beat him/her to the gun with character assassination, by spewing Dem/media talking points.
Or, again, telling the truth.
My only caveat would be that you have to be competent about something in order to lie about it.
I suppose there’s that. Lol.
The failure of leadership by our President during this crisis is world class and fully exposes his infantile concerns and toddler like self centeredness. He still has not used the Defense Production Act, which only he is able to and shortages of test and PPEs continues along with the chaotic market for them. A national strategy has neither been elucidated or defined in working plans and no one with experience is in command. Impotent chaos is on daily display, not reassuring but realistic facing of facts and determination to prevail. Imagine DDay being run from various state capitals and you have why our response is an international embarrassment and why we as the most powerful nation on earth are not in a position to save ourselves, let alone lead the rest of the world.
D Day being run by separate state offices>> awesome analogy.
Anonymous is following the ever downward slide of the Pecking Parrot.
Apparently you believe in Stupid Anon’s comment: ” Imagine DDay being run from various state capitals ”
Imagine treating an entire area with virtually no Covid the same as treating NYC. Such a thinking process is abominably stupid.
ohhh…alliteration. Or is it assonance? Either way, stepping up on the poetics.
And by the way, your analogy is the perfect example of how an area relatively unaffected reaches epidemic proportions in a couple of easy steps.
What you are suggesting is that South Dakota with death rate of 14 per million, total 11 deaths, be treated the same as NYC that has a death rate of 1,153 per million and 22,612 deaths. Most people would look at you and shake their heads.
And of course, you being smart, would know that while shaking their heads they’d be ignorant of how epidemics become pandemics.
It is obvious that you know little about the subject. I just happen to know a little bit more.
…, but definitely not as much as you think you know.
I don’t think I know that much. It is just that you guys know so little and are swayed by arguments that have little basis. You are free to question anything I said but you can’t because you don’t seem to be able to incorporate what you read into a sensible argument.
Allan, you know nothing. And it’s well documented. But I can’t respond to you in depth because the moderator doesn’t like me dunking on your bean all the time.
The moderator would greatly appreciate it if you had something to offer. You can’t respond in depth because you are ignorant of the facts. Most of your posts demonstrate profound ignorance either by omission or comission.
This was easy to respond to but your soundbites ran out of responses so you substituted debate with insults.
Take another try: “What you are suggesting is that South Dakota with death rate of 14 per million, total 11 deaths, be treated the same as NYC that has a death rate of 1,153 per million and 22,612 deaths. Most people would look at you and shake their heads.”
Anonymous:
We can sum up your arguments as: “Orangeman bad”.
Try thinking.
I do think. That’s why Orange Man bad is an accurate, although kindergarten-ish, assessment of the executive branch right now.
MonumentColorado: why is Trump orange (with yellow hair)? Do Trump followers think older executives favor odd, artificial color tones?
Anonymous says:
April 27, 2020 at 11:38 AM
I’ll leave the character assasination to you.
“why is Trump orange”
Paint Chips is demonstrating a new racist slant based on a tinge of orange appearing color. Racisim will never disappear as long as people like Paint Chips are around.
Anonymous, you’re correct. The travel ban imposed on January 31 is essentially ancient history at this point. So much has happened since and so much will happen still. Revisiting the travel ban is simply a mindless Culture Wars arguement at this point.
LARRY KING: We’re back – a couple more phone calls on this very important topic. Our guests are former United States Senator Howard Baker; Richard Allen, former National Security Adviser; and Lois Romano of The Washington Post. San Luis Obispo, California, hello.
CALLER: Yes, hello. I’m wondering what a staffer would do besides go to the press in Washington? My daughter has just left there, after working for a prominent senator, and could not get through with her problems at all, and the only thing she could have done was go to the press, and she chose not to do it out of respect for him.
KING: In other words, she had a story to tell but, out of respect for the person she worked for, she didn’t tell it?
CALLER: That’s true.
KING: Yes, but these are the people who do come to the Lois Romanos, right?
LOIS ROMANO (The Washington Post) : Uh-huh.
KING: The staff worker who says, ‘I want to let you know about what’s going on either with my boss or the guy down the hall.’
ROMANO: ‘This is going on, and I’m troubled.’ Uh-huh. And a lot of these people have a sense of obligation. They feel that this public official should be accountable, if it’s something wrong.
KING: They’re whistle-blowers to the press.
ROMANO: Exactly.
“ancient history” and yet here you are flogging it Seth
Paint Chips must have upped his dose of lead in the paint.
Ancient history and, unfortunately, largely ineffective.
And yet you fear it. try to keep up cupcake
Hard fo me to go that slow f twizzler.
So Comrade Pelosi is feeling the pressure and our love for our Constitutional Republic versus her exhibited disregard for that document and the Oath of Office. That move clearly means she got a big time counseling from her campaign advisers. Question… Does that make them accessories?
The nose, the chin, the lips, the eyebrows: It is striking how Nancy looks like Michael Jackson
New Yorkers elected these leaders and now they’re paying the price.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/24/opinion/coronavirus-lockdown.html
“As of Friday, there have been more Covid-19 fatalities on Long Island’s Nassau County (population 1.4 million) than in all of California (population 40 million). There have been more fatalities in Westchester County (989) than in Texas (611). The number of Covid deaths per 100,000 residents in New York City (132) is more than 16 times what it is in America’s next largest city, Los Angeles (8). If New York City proper were a state, it would have suffered more fatalities than 41 other states combined.
Americans are being told they must still play by New York rules — with all the hardships they entail — despite having neither New York’s living conditions nor New York’s health outcomes. This is bad medicine, misguided public policy, and horrible politics.”
I have a suspicion that what’s happened in Downstate New York and northern New Jersey has been driven by the virus invading the hospitals and nursing homes. The people dying today would, as often as not, contracted it two weeks after the city went on lock down.
One thing that hits you about all of this is how the prevalence of this varies wildly from one commuter belt to another. The area around New Orleans, New York, and Detroit have been in wretched shape. This has now spread to a menu of belts in New England: the Connecticut coastal complex, Hartford, Springfield, Mass.: Boston, and, to a lesser degree, Providence and Worcester. The five counties around Albany, Georgia are in wretched shape. The number of deaths per resident in the 10 counties around Atlanta amount to less than 1/10 th the rate measured in Albany. The belts in Maryland and Virginia are doing passably compared to New York, but there is tremendous range. Just the other day, the mortality rate around DC was 150 per million; that around Baltimore and Richmond was 100 per million; that around the Tidewater urban complex (Norfolk, Newport News) was 30 per million. Miami had a death rate of 112 per million. In and around Tampa, Orlando, and Jacksonville, it was 20-30 per million. Around Philadelphia it was 185 per million, around Pittsburgh 70 per million. Puzzling this out is a challenge.
DSS, It’s apparent ability to silently spread to me is its most disturbing feature. I tend to side with the experts that believe the disease is far more widespread than previously believed which reduces the mortality rate to close proximity of the flu. I recently posted an interview of Katz and Ioannides that I didn’t recognize was only 3 minutes long because I had tossed it having seen the original Mark Levin interview. I think they are on the money. Could it be viral load (a very large number of people have already been infected in NY probably percentage wise larger than anywhere else in the US. Could the virus have been more virulent at the beginning which is said to often happen, could it be genetics? I think that will become clearer in future as genetic and serologic testing are performed. I hope they have blood remaining from the initial cases along with people that didn’t have the virus.
“York’s most conservative Republican voters say they trust him more than President Donald Trump.
That’s one of the findings of a new Siena College poll released Monday that shows the governor’s job performance rating stands at 71 percent, his highest ever in his near-decade in office.
Some 56 percent of Republican voters say they trust Cuomo to decide how to reopen New York, versus 36 percent who trust Trump.
Even those who self-identify as conservative, the pollsters said, trust Cuomo more by a 23-point margin….”
https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/politics/ny-republicans-trust-cuomo-more-than-trump-on-virus-rebound-new-poll-shows/2390989/
MJMichaels:
This is from your New York Times article. This paragraph follows your last paragraph:
………………………………………………..
It isn’t hard to guess why. New York has, by far, the highest population density in the U.S. among cities of 100,000 or more. Commuters crowd trains, office workers crowd elevators, diners crowd restaurants. No other American city has the same kind of jammed pedestrian life as New York — Times Square alone gets 40 million visitors a year — or as many residents packed into high-rises. The city even has a neighborhood called Corona, which, it turns out, has among the highest rates of coronavirus infections.
Are you going to update this to clarify that you took a Pelosi quote based on a travel ban from Myanmar, Eritrea, Kyrgyzstan, Nigeria, Tanzania and Sudan, and you pretended it was about China?
No, he won’t. Most of his columns begin with false information as part of the premise. For a national commentator, he needs better fact checking.
“The Trump Administration’s expansion of its outrageous, un-American travel ban threatens our security, our values and the rule of law.”
Nancy Pelosi
Pelosi isn’t just referring to the expansion of the ban here. She’s referring to the original ban and its expansion.
Her comment was in response to a ban on travel from 6 African countries, not China, and the “expansion” was not of the China travel policy.
“…..Trump implemented the first version of the travel ban just over three years ago against several Muslim-majority nations. A revised version of that ban was later upheld by the Supreme Court, and travel from Iran, Libya, Syria, Somalia and Yemen is still restricted.
The administration separately curtailed travel from North Korea and Venezuela….”
https://thehill.com/homenews/house/480991-pelosi-trumps-expanded-travel-ban-is-outrageous-un-american-and-threatens-rule
Cheer up. Americans rely on talking points and sound bites to make their conclusions on who to vote. Nancy gave Americans a magnificent soundbite to vote a straight ticket for Republicans.
“The Trump Administration’s expansion of its outrageous, un-American travel ban threatens our security, our values and the rule of law.”
Nancy Pelosi
I appreciate the timing of that press conference. But I don’t think she intended to limit herself to that. And what do you hope to gain from that if she did?
There is a problem when you start playing the race card to any and all situations. The problem with Trump is that his bans after January 23 did not go far enough.
A simple “my bad” would suffice SteveJ.
Ha! I’m not averse to that. I’ve given you one of those before. I just think this is a pretty weak takedown. I find this to be a ticky tack gotcha with her quote. I don’t mind Turley using it.
We have different standards then Steve. JT has misrepresented a quote on which he is attacking on that person. That’s not ticky-tacky, though the column is, and it hardly gets worse.
Best to attack Trump as opposed to sticking up for Pelosi statements on coronavirus travel bans.
Best to start with the truth and see where that leads.
Part of the truth is recognizing the political nature of a press conference and the way language is used in it. That Pelosi was limiting herself in the ways you suggest are a bit fanciful.
Under this kind of pedantic scrutiny, Trump was not careless about his disinfectant comments. The “truth” is he never told anyone to swallow Lysol. No worries.
Your attempts to disregard the truth of what was said is boring me and this is my last response.
Pelosi’s comments were specific and did not mean what you and Turley allege. Therefore, you are lying since you now know better and Turley may be lying or just a sloppy follower of Fox News.
“Your attempts to disregard the truth of what was said is boring me,”
By that standard, you’ve already done plenty of that with Trump’s disinfectant comments.
The Professor didn’t say the quote was about China.
Then his column makes no sense.
All the woman had to do to avoid the alleged confusion was tweet: “In contrast the ban on China travelers, which needs to go much farther, I oppose the extension of this 3 year old ban.”
She didn’t tweet that way for a reason.
The speaker was not considering SteveJ’s confusion about her clear and specific statement . He’s got her there.
You have a pretty systemic breakdown here. China telegraphed to everybody they were lying when the shut down Wuhan and other cities, costing trillions of dollars, on January 23. Perhaps if an economist had put it to Trump like that, it would have perked Trump’s ear up. But the Speaker knew of this as well, she is third in line to the Presidency, in a different party, and she was clueless as well. The media are not supposed to be potted plants passively regurgitating talking points from politicians. So they were asleep at the switch as well. Very few people, other than some economists, bothered to look at what China was doing, and urge appropriate action.
Oh come on JT. Trump, who has access to the best information and advice then anyone in the world ignored the virus and downplayed the severity well into Match. People act like the travel ban from China was some heroic move, but it was only one thing. Yes Pelosi is now changing stances, but Trump did really mess this one up on an epic scale.
Trump had access to the CDC’s Fauci and Fauci later had to admit he was wrong and Trump was right. Try thinking and skip how you feel.
COVID was no worse than the flu.
We should have never locked down our country.
The destruction of our country is on the Democrats just like the Civil War of 1860s
CV-19 killed more people in a month than the flu kills in 2 years.
And is extraordinarlly contagious according to all experts.
With asymptomatics doing the super spreading.
It isn’t.
Without testing it’s not possible to determine this for sure in the states, but world wide, anywhere from 2-4 times more contagious than the flu.
Alas, Americans are the ones voting in November, not experts
sux to be a Democrat. our sympathies. not
Annually flu infections and flu deaths frequently exceed the number of Covid deaths so the statement by anonymous “CV-19 killed more people in a month than the flu kills in 2 years.” is absolutely ridiculous.
And 100% true.
Your shorthand doesn’t make it clear what you believe though it indicates that you likely believe a falsehood.
“Annually flu infections and flu deaths frequently exceed the number of Covid deaths so the statement by anonymous “CV-19 killed more people in a month than the flu kills in 2 years.” is absolutely ridiculous.”
While you are at it define whether or not world you refer to world deaths or a specific country.
From the rightish NR
To be fair, the number of flu deaths per year go through serious fluctuations depending on the flu that hits, etc. But a ‘normal’ year is in the 30k range.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/coronavirus-kills-more-americans-in-one-month-than-the-flu-kills-in-one-year/
2017 -2018 flu season 61,000 deaths in US Which makes the person who said more Covid deaths in a month than 2 years of the flu into one that needs to do research before putting anything into words.
Quick search of the net for world figures: Headline: “5 Million Cases Worldwide, 650,000 Deaths Annually: The Seasonal Flu Virus is a “Serious Concern”, But the Wuhan Coronavirus Grabs the Headlines”
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/season/flu-season-2017-2018.htm
17-18 a big year certainly, much bigger than the 12k 5 years earlier. Still CV-19 covers the 17-18 total in a month and change.
A little different than the 15 cases that would soon disappear, no?
Actually, wait. Don’t answer. I’m under instructions not to respond to you.
Flu’s vary in their intensity over the years and the number of deaths is held down by vaccination but to say “CV-19 killed more people in a month than the flu kills in 2 years.” is ignorant. It doesn’t even include the parameters such as world deaths or US deaths etc., it doesn’t include bad flu years. You neglect the Spanish Flu ~500 million people infected (1/3rd of the population of the world) Death toll estimated 17-50 million and maybe as high as 100 million. Swine flu confirmed cases 1.6 million with estimates of the total number of 700 million and some say up to 1.4 billion. Estimates of number of dead 284,000, range 150,000 to 575,000. The WHO estimate of the number of people that die from the flu worldwide to be between 250,000 -500,000.
These numbers make your statement “CV-19 killed more people in a month than the flu kills in ****2 years*****.” sound very silly.
“The Coronavirus Isn’t Just the Flu, Bro”
“Results from recent blood tests show how widely the disease has spread, and they indicate that Covid-19 is many times deadlier than seasonal influenza.”
By Justin Fox
April 24, 2020, 11:21 AM CDT
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-04-24/is-coronavirus-worse-than-the-flu-blood-studies-say-yes-by-far
“Experts demolish studies suggesting COVID-19 is no worse than flu”
“Authors of widely publicized antibody studies “owe us all an apology,” one expert says.”
BETH MOLE – 4/24/2020, 12:33 PM
https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/04/experts-demolish-studies-suggesting-covid-19-is-no-worse-than-flu/
“Why Is COVID-19 Coronavirus Causing Strokes In Young And Middle-Aged People?”
Robert Glatter, MD
https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertglatter/2020/04/27/why-is-covid-19-coronavirus-causing-strokes-in-young-and-middle-aged-people/#71979de034df
because they are fat puhqs. you do not need a doctor to tell you that, fat phqk anonymous
The death rate is not 3-5% and has been whitting down towards the death rate of the flu.
A 5% death rate is 50,000 per million infected
A threefold deathrate of the flu (assume .1%) per milliion infected is 3,000 or 2,000 more than the flu not 49,000 more so don’t draw your conclusions based on you inability to understand mathematics.
It is in that range for people over 60 who develop a symptomatic illness. For certain subpopulations, this illness is lethal.
“It is in that range for people over 60 who develop a symptomatic illness. For certain subpopulations, this illness is lethal.”
That is true and that makes Covid less lethal for other populations. That along with numbers is confusing to anonymous. If the healthy don’t die then they can do what they normally do which in general is work and support the economy. The elderly and infirm can try and quarantine themselves or not but at least the economy will function so it can pay for Medicare, social security, Medicaid, etc. and the death rates from an entire nation quarantined will fall.
The confused rarely recognize their own confusion. A case in point? Allan.
“The confused rarely recognize their own confusion. A case in point? Allan.”
I was nice enough to explain the numbers to you based on what I know. You had ample opportunity to provide your input. You didn’t because those numbers make sense and you don’t have the ability to deal with them so you said something stupid. You must be very upset that your education was so poor and you must hate anyone that might have a bit of intelligence.
Why do you wish to live up to your name, Anonymous the Stupid?
“That along with numbers is confusing to anonymous. ” -Allan
Nope. Not at all.
Jerks, though? Guys like Allan? They’re a dime a dozen. And they seem to hang out here.
Anonymous the Stupid we will consider nominating you for the Anonymous the Stupid award next time. You didn’t win the award the first time not because of your Stupidity. You are among the most Stupid but the first award went to someone who had at least done something. Here is the announcement of the award.
—
Governor Andrew Cuomo wins the first Anonymous the Stupid award ever given. I have no number for the final death toll due to Cuomo’s Stupid and ideologic act. Overnight without warning the Cuomo administration ordered that Covid 19 patients be admitted to Nursing Homes even though the nursing homes weren’t prepared. We all know what follows a Stupid order like that. Death of many seniors that instead of getting care were essentially killed.
25% of NY’s death rate comes from Nursing Homes. 3,448 residents in NY Nursing Homes died.
The Anonymous the Stupid award was unanimous though some of the voters formerly living in nursing homes were unable to vote. They are dead.
“Results from recent blood tests show how widely the disease has spread, and they indicate that Covid-19 is many times deadlier than seasonal influenza.”
It may be more deadly than the flu when one is infected but no where near the original fears and probably a lot closer ito the real number of deaths (of those infected) seen in the flu season. Remember the flu death rate is a fraction of a percent and the initial estimates were talking about were up to 5 %. You have to bring that to the level of actual numbers to see that the statement is quite deceiving. 5% of 1 million is 50,000. Many times deadlier than say .1 which is 1000 and could be 3,000 which is a multiple (many) but 47,000 less lives lost than intially thought by some of the people.
That serology that you talk about demonstrates a wider spread of the disease and thus reduces the death rate so time will give us better estimates. The one that did the Santa Clara study says that and so do Dr Katz and Dr. ioannides. ? Harvard or Yale and Stanford respectively. The latter was mentioned in your article.
Many times deadlier is scarier than it sounds when one considers the earlier 3- 5% death rate many argued against at the time.
It’s lethal to people over 60 and to people over 50 with certain conditions, like a high BMI. For this subset, the fatality rate for people with a symptomatic infection appears to be around 5%. It can be extraordinarily unpleasant for others (or not), but it is seldom life threatening for them. It would have been ideal if we could have quarantined the elderly and those in late middle age with excess weight and outfitted others with protective equipment, but the supply chain back ups prevented the latter.
There were likely better responses than the ones states implemented. Coulda shoulda woulda. It’s always that way, in some measure.
What I’m hoping is that we’ll have plenty of inventory for the fall. That means people who cannot telecommute go to work in masks, don’t talk to each other much or stand near each other, and use sanitizer. That means respiratory patients and their care teams are strictly segregated from everyone else everywhere. That means the old are sheltering in place, as are fat people over 50. That means workplaces where social distancing is not an option have public health controls in place and no one under 60 on site.
In short mount some sort of pandemic response. It’d be nice to have some federal backup in that response rather than have a clown parade around with his thumb up his butt at insane pressers.
Can’t red herring out on stats with a number of fatalities so high either. 5% of over 50k at present isn’t a small number and health care workers and first responders took the brunt.
Stunning how America is stubbornly refusing to learn its pandemic lessons.
The EC elected a reality TV star, not a leader who GAF about anything past his own daily attention and ego stroking.
Yes having an academic who never publishes in scholarly literature and a state legislator who is a recognized maven in no area of policy would have been so much better, particularly if he’d run the Chicago Annenberg Challenge into the ground.
Absurd refers to Obama.but I believe the deeper reality is that the permanent bureaucracies are staffed with incompetents and if the POTUS from either party gets things done well, somehow, it’s probably in spite of them as much as because of them.
The press is utterly unhelpful. Here we can see how they have been ignoring the experimental use of UV light devices all weekend, si,ply because their constant orders from the press bosses is cut down Trump 24/7 by latching on to whatever vague thing he says and making a mountain out of a molehill. This is so tiresome.
Rather than just blame one man at the top as is our habit, perhaps we would be better off to have a gallows pole in every major city doing full time service for all the petty tyrants and incompetents in the bureaucracies and the nattering nabobs of negativity. ?? Just tossing an idea out there.
Kurtz, there is one leader at the top who has the power and responsibility to marshal the bureaucracies under his command to meet a serious crisis like the corona virus. DDay didn’t plan itself, nor did the US go from the 16th ranked military in 1939 to the most powerful in the world 3 years later because industry and government came together on their own. You may forgive Trump under some fantasy of his wisdom and selflessness, but even if that was true, he has to act and make it work. He won’t. He can’t.
The Pecking Parrot couldn’t find his way out of a paper bag. Trump has done a phenomenal job of bringing government and industry together to fight Covid. He has acted in the fashion of great military leaders knowing when to push and when not to. He learned how to delegate power and instead of centralizing power he understood the benefits of federalism and decentralized power which is part of what made America great in the first place. Not only that but in an honest interview Brix said that Trump had excellent command of the numbers presented to him by the experts. She attributed that expertise to his business experience where he had to look at trends and the like.
Aha…, Absurd busts out the Dinesh D’Souza scnlock. Wondering if Dinesh dated Ann Coulter pre or post prison? Either way, it’s hilarious.
As to Trump comparisons — with anyone — welll, he loses.
” busts out the Dinesh D’Souza scnlock.”
Are his words to big for you to understand? I guess you didn’t like his book “The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left”. It probably hit too close to home.
DSS, If I were making suggestions I would suggest respiratory excersises for the very old and the obese. It seems we have learned that placing people in severe respiratory distress on their abdomens improves oxygenation. That would mean the dependent portions of the lung were most serverely impacted and they dependent because of sitting, lying and being a couch potatoe.
Before any type of chest surgery I believe many are placed on what is called an inspirometer that is a simple plastic gaget that controls the force of inspiration and therefore would excercise the chest wall along with helping to open up the dependent portions of the lungs. Activity, stretching etc. might be able to accomplish similar things but the very old and obese frequently don’t want to or can’t. An inspirometer might help.
Or you could just lose weight.
“Estimates of pandemic influenza mortality ranged from 0.03 percent of the world’s population during the 1968 H3N2 pandemic to 1 percent to 3 percent of the world’s population during the 1918 H1N1 pandemic. It is estimated that 0.001 percent to 0.007 percent of the world’s population died of respiratory complications associated with (H1N1)pdm09 virus infection during the first 12 months the virus circulated.“
CDC
The funny thing about this mess is that there are similar criticisms, what people say about Xi ignoring the threat is much like what some people say now about Trump.
Whatever the differences in our systems, and whatever their respective failings, I believe that both Xi and Trump are sincere leaders who want the common good for their own nations. And that they both have corrupt and incompent bureaucracies full of corrupt malingerers “advising” them poorly.
The modern administrative state is a freak-show of incompetence and their finest skill is avoiding blame and kicking it up the ladder to the top.
A matter in which the global press always assists and aids them. Constant dissent and derision, that’s 90% of what the fake news offers up to us, when they’re not busy selling us more useless junk.
“Whatever the differences in our systems, and whatever their respective failings, I believe that both Xi and Trump are sincere leaders who want the common good for their own nations…..”
There is no evidence that is true about Trump and I don’t care about XI. Trump is neither serious enough to even think about real problems and their solutions or concerned about anything beyond stroking his own ego. I think you have to prove that assertion.
Blaming our rudderless response to this crisis on those below is BS that voters will not accept, nor should they.
oh, Trump’s made some mistakes, that’s for sure. He should have slammed the door shut on European travel for example. And what’s the holdup with testing?
But you guys seem to think this is all so simple and easy, Well, it isnt.
Kurtz, WWII wasn’t simple and neither is being President. This isn’t a case of trying hard and failing. He isn’t using the tools at his disposal and obviously has no grasp of how to deal with the crisis.
No one, absolutely no one, thinks this would be easy, Kurtz. But there’s no way around it, it all comes down to testing. Trump missed the boat in January and February when he should’ve activated the DPA for it and he’s missing the boat now. Granted, there is something to your point of beauracratic powers being off everywhere…but they take their cues from the top on this one. No one wants to be wrong on something like this, Trump just wasn’t, and isn’t present in the way any president should be in a like situation. Surprise, surprise…, the birther that began a quest for the White House by talking trash about Mexicans on an escalator isn’t capable of the job. This is a ‘400’ level crisis, Trump is still struggling to pass remedial level crisis so he can fail at the ‘400’ level.
“Trump missed the boat in January and February when he should’ve activated the DPA for it and he’s missing the boat now. ”
That wasn’t the problem. I will repeat one of the better explanations.
—–
Here’s Why We Didn’t Have Coronavirus Testing In February
Posted at 1:01 pm on April 20, 2020
If you’ve been on Twitter lately you’ve probably noticed an increasing number of people on the left are claiming that President Trump has blood on his hands. Even those who aren’t going quite that far are eager to blame Trump for a “lost month” in February during which the government failed to ramp up testing. For instance:
The most economically, scientifically, and technologically advanced country on the planet is ranked 38th in tests per person. Donald Trump had to work hard to screw up such a massive advantage. His trust in China lost months, as did his belief COVID-19 would magically go away. https://t.co/2jkbagnu3N
— Joe Scarborough (@JoeNBC) April 19, 2020
Like a lot of partisan claims, there is some truth to this one. It’s true that February could have been a moment to ramp up testing in order to see more clearly how quickly the virus was spreading and it’s true that didn’t happen. Why it didn’t happen is another matter.
Over the weekend the Washington Post published a deep dive on the problems at the Centers for Disease Control which cost the U.S. about a month of progress. Effort by the CDC to create a coronavirus test began in mid-January after China published the genetic sequence of the virus:
Those familiar with the events said the design efforts were led by Stephen Lindstrom, an accomplished respiratory virus specialist who was a co-inventor of seven earlier CDC tests for strains of the flu…
The test kits featured two components that focused on separate regions of the virus’s genome, a standard approach. However, the CDC also outfitted the kits with a third component, a pan-coronavirus segment. That addition sought to identify a wider family of coronaviruses, of which covid-19 is the most recent strain to be observed in humans. Tests that were being developed abroad under sponsorship from the World Health Organization did not include this extra feature.
In essence, the CDC-designed test kit included and extra segment that would have allowed users to include people who had SARS or similar coronaviruses. It’s not clear what the point of this third segment of the test was but the important point is that only the first two segments of the test kit were needed to identify COVID-19.
The addition of the third test segment might not have mattered except that it wound up creating a significant problem. The CDC decided to manufacture the test kids “in house” rather than rely on outside labs. And during that process, the reagents used in the third segment of the test became contaminated. We know this because when the CDC sent out the initial batch of test kits, nearly all of them gave false positives on the third segment. Here’s what happened:
In the fourth week of January, the CDC shipped out the kits to more than two dozen public health labs scattered across the country, from Albany, N.Y., to Richmond, Calif…
The labs were instructed by the CDC to demonstrate that the test would work before analyzing samples from patients.
But when those facilities began using the kits to analyze a negative control sample — highly purified water supplied by each lab and free of any genetic material — the tests wrongly signaled the presence of the coronavirus.
The third segment of the test was supposed to detect a whole range of coronaviruses. But in order to make sure the test was working properly, the labs were running the test with pure water. The test should have reliably given a negative result since there was no virus in the water. Instead, all of the labs got false positives, which indicated one of the reagents provided by the CDC had been contaminated during production.
Exactly how this contamination happened still isn’t clear but as a result the public labs were in limbo. They had a test showing a false positive. However, the false positives were only appearing on the third, unnecessary segment of the test. In theory, the labs could have continued to use the test without that problematic third segment but that would require special permission from the FDA. Until that was granted, the labs had to use the test as designed. In mid February it seems the CDC plan was to re-manufacture the one contaminated reagent [emphasis added]:
The first public hint of trouble with the test came during a Feb. 12 press briefing in which the CDC’s Messonnier mentioned unspecified “issues” bedeviling the public health labs. At the time, most American clinics and hospitals remained unable to test for the coronavirus…
“We think that the issue at the states can be explained by one reagent that isn’t performing as it should consistently, and that’s why we are remanufacturing that reagent,” she said.
At the public health labs, officials struggled to figure out what was wrong. Some labs determined that the test would work without the third component. But under the CDC’s emergency instructions, health officials had to use the test as it had been designed.
On February 23, a top FDA official named Timothy Stenzel finally went to the CDC lab in Atlanta to sort out what was going on.
During his visit in Atlanta, Stenzel determined that the problems with the coronavirus test were caused by the CDC’s manufacturing, not the design, according to the FDA. The shortcomings with the test kits were attributable to what the FDA described as a “manufacturing issue.’’
Stenzel advised CDC officials to stop making the kits in-house…
The FDA on Feb. 26 informed the CDC by email that the labs could begin testing samples while skipping the third component.
To sum all of this up, we had a test designed and manufactured by late January, but initial validation showed one segment of the test had been contaminated. That third segment wasn’t necessary to test patients for COVID-19 but only the FDA could allow the labs to perform tests without using the third segment. For some reason, it took the FDA nearly a month to get to the bottom of the problem. Why was that exactly?
There’s one paragraph in the story which states, “Stenzel for nearly a month could not determine, based on information provided by the CDC, whether the kits were failing because of a ‘design or manufacturing issue.’’’ That’s pretty thin but it’s not hard to imagine there were frequent calls between the FDA and the CDC in February. The CDC was saying, hey, we think we’ve got this figured out just give us a few more days. And the FDA was on the other end of those calls saying, hey, we’re in a hurry, can’t we run the tests without the third segment? Finally in the last week of February the FDA got tired of the BS, showed up at the lab, said no more in-house manufacturing of tests and allowed labs to run the tests without the 3rd segment.
But this wasn’t the only problem. While all of this was happening, competent outside labs were stalled in creating their own alternative tests because once the U.S. declared a public health emergency, which it did in late January, the FDA had to approve any outside tests. Anyone who wanted to create their own test would face reams of FDA paperwork to secure an “emergency use authorization,” something many hospital labs didn’t begin to know how to get:
Academic hospitals, which have laboratories that routinely develop tests to use on their patients, began to get increasingly anxious about the nation being dependent on the CDC lab. They considered pursuing FDA approval for their tests but complained they didn’t have the resources or expertise — or access to crucial materials such as the virus itself — for the complicated application process required during a public health emergency.
“When the CDC test was delayed, then the cases started appearing outside of China, there should have been a quicker response to get diagnostic testing going” by easing regulations on hospital labs, said Melissa Miller, director of the clinical molecular microbiology laboratory at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine.
During the Zika outbreak, some laboratories developed their own tests and got letters from the FDA notifying them that their tests had not been approved. Even as coronavirus testing remained limited nationwide, the CDC reminded hospitals on Feb. 18 that they shouldn’t do their own testing without an “emergency use authorization” from the FDA.
So the FDA not only didn’t sort out the mess at the CDC quickly, it also warned everyone else to stay on the sidelines unless they’d gone through a laborious approval process. The outcome of all of this is that we had very little testing happening in February.
A combination of mistakes and red tape cost us at least several weeks when we should have been moving forward with testing. That may be President Trump’s fault in the “buck stops here” ultimate sense but blaming him directly for a series of missteps by highly trained professionals seems to overlook the real problem: Bureaucracies don’t respond well, or quickly, to new challenges.
“And what’s the holdup with testing?”
Kurtz the hold up in testing was from the CDC and FDA. Once Trump took control it went amazingly fast.
This often repeated theme from the mass media that Trumps only “strokes his own ego–” did they come up with that in a focus group or something? it’s like a mantra and you guys chant it over and over
Why?
You told us why:
“BS that voters will not accept”
See, that’s what you really care about. The election. The virus is real, but the response is becoming so utterly politicized, from the yahooos blocking streets in lansing, to the liars in the fake news who say Trump does nothing right— it’s no wonder that people are so cynical.
I’m cynical as hell but I’m not so cynical, nor simple minded, to believe that we should be focusing on electioneering at this point. but that’s where your mind is, isnt it?
Kurtz, Trump’s character is as transparent as it gets and there is nothing suggesting a person seriously grasping with the nation’s problems. He watches TV half the day and tweets about his popularity and perceived enemies then gets before a podium and congratulates himself while attacking reporters. It’s like junior high with this guy. Doesn’t read reports and fires people who don’t say yes. He’s incapable of leading.
Well that’s your judgment and in the meantime he’s been doing it for three years and it wasnt quite so bad as youi’ve cracked it up to be all along
somedays you’re like a carbon copy of the guys who can’t think of a single thing Obama did that was successful.
it’s the sort of thing that turns regular people off to the whole political process and elections in general. of course the current thinking among election consultants– of both parties– is that the middle or the undecideds are insignificant and the whole effort should be aimed at turning out the vote from the base. seems un-helpful to me but I sense you know a lot more about electioneering than I do
Kurtz, tell me something requiring effort and seriousness of purpose that Trump has done successfully. Before us is a serious crisis and he is failing the test of leadership spectacularly.
The media, collectively in lockstep – mass-media – is propaganda with a capital ‘P’ – quite literally a mouthpiece for the party. As for their schizophrenia, what would you expect from the party of Tammany Hall, militancy, free-sexing, and drug culture?
PELOSI is a NUT CASE – she thinks she is a QUEEN?- Almighty- She called for people to go to China town – she called Trump a racist – anything Trump is for she is against. She needs to RETIRE – perhaps come November she will be forced to Retire as Speaker – if the Republicans take the House back – my guess she will retire from the House come Jan. for her party will vote her out and she would not like going back to being a common congress women, without power.
She is the ICE CREAM QUEEN. Maybe an ice cream company will hire her to do advertisements?????????????????????
It fascinates me that Pelosi, and others, continue, in the face of video clip evidence, to make completely contradictory statements. They have no shame and they insult our intelligence.
“The timeline
Trump was impeached on Dec. 19. The trial ended Feb. 5, when the Senate acquitted him.
On Jan. 8, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued its first alert advising U.S. clinicians to watch for patients with respiratory symptoms and a travel history to Wuhan, China.It’s unclear exactly when the president was first notified about the potential of a pandemic.
On Jan. 20, the first confirmed case of COVID-19 was appeared in the U.S., in Washington state.
On Jan. 22, when CNBC asked him if there were any concerns about the virus spreading in the U.S., Trump said, “We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China, and we have it under control. It’s going to be just fine.”
On Jan. 31, Trump implemented China travel restrictions, a move he often points to when defending his administration’s actions to address the pandemic. That day, the CDC reported seven cases of coronavirus in the U.S.
By Feb. 4, there were 11 confirmed cases in the U.S.
On Feb. 25, CDC official Nancy Messonnier warned that a coronavirus outbreak in the U.S. was inevitable.
On Feb. 28, at a Charleston, South Carolina, rally, Trump called the coronavirus the Democrats’ “new hoax.” That day, there were 59 confirmed cases and two coronavirus deaths in the United States, according to the World Health Organization. There were 4,691 cases around the globe.
Throughout February and early March, Trump insisted the U.S. had the coronavirus under control and that Americans should stay calm. At a televised visit to the CDC on March 6, Trump said the coronavirus “came out of nowhere.”
During this time, Trump played golf on Jan. 18 and 19, Feb. 1 and 15, and March 7 and 8, according to the Trump Golf Count website.
He hosted rallies on Jan. 9 (Toledo, Ohio); 14 (Milwaukee), 28 (Wildwood, N.J.) and 30 (Des Moines, Iowa), as well as Feb. 10 (Manchester, N.H.), 19 (Phoenix), 20 (Colorado Springs), 21 (Las Vegas) and 28 (Charleston, S.C.).
On March 11, the WHO declaredCOVID-19 a pandemic. Additional European travel bans were implemented on the same day, but restrictions for the United Kingdom didn’t come until two days later, after people re-entered the U.S. from Britain and Ireland.
On March 16, the White House released social distancing guidelines to limit gatherings of no more than 10 people.
On March 17, Trump changed from his previous statements that the virus would not severely impact the U.S. and said, “This is a pandemic. … I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic.”
Our ruling: True
The information in this post has been rated true because Trump did host rallies and play golf on the listed dates in the early stages of the coronavirus spread.
Our fact-check sources:
•President Trump’s Golf Outings
•CDC coronavirus alert
•Trump rallies 2020 campaign
•Remarksby President Trump at Signing of the Coronavirus Preparedness and Response Supplemental Appropriations Act, 2020
•TheNew York Times, He Could Have Seen What Was Coming: Behind Trump’s Failure on the Virus
•NPR, ATimeline Of Coronavirus Comments From President Trump And WHO
•New England Journal of Medicine
•What thepresident said he did on the virus — and what he actually did”
After the bloated fascist restricted entrance from China, some 40,000 people came through. Pelosi is a blue dawg corporate elite demoRat and I’ll be glad to see her go. In spite of that, the blame for the US high rate of infection lies right at the fascist’s feet, they are probably small also. The fascist couldn’t tell the truth if his live depended on it. Besides, he’s busy injecting Clorox, inhaling Lysol and sticking an UV light up his bum. And there is still a basket full of deplorables that can’t accept the truth. You can lead a trump support to the truth but you can’t make them think.
What does sgtsabai and Nancy Pelosi have in common? They both distort the truth and lie.
“Trump called the coronavirus the Democrats’ “new hoax.” ”
—
1. Trump called the coronavirus “a hoax”
To this day the left (and the media) claim Trump called the coronavirus a hoax. He said no such thing. While the country was distracted by impeachment, the Trump administration was busy addressing the coronavirus outbreak, taking various measures to limit the spread of the virus in the United States. Impeachment quickly faded, so they decided to aggressively politicize his response to the coronavirus outbreak. Joe Biden even called Trump’s travel ban with China an overreaction, and accused him of trying to scare the public. “This is no time for Donald Trump’s record of hysteria and xenophobia ± hysterical xenophobia — and fearmongering to lead the way instead of science.”
President Trump responded to these allegations during a rally in South Carolina, calling the Democrats’ politicization of the coronavirus “the new hoax.” The media jumped on this line, claiming that Trump called the virus, not the Democrats’ reactions to it, a hoax. The lie spread like wildfire and Joe Biden even used the lie as a talking point on the stump. There was quite a stir when Politico’s story repeating the false claim that Trump called the virus a hoax was flagged by Facebook fact-checkers as fake news, but other fact-checkers couldn’t deny that the claim was false either.
Of course some of those lacking a brain will have a knee jerk response and say what about the rest of the statements made by sgtsabai. Answering all the junk put out there one by one is time consuming. This is faster.
—
The Top 10 Lies About President Trump’s Response to the Coronavirus
It’s troubling to see how quickly disinformation about the government’s response to the coronavirus has spread. Democrats and the mainstream media have willingly spread false information in the hopes of damaging Trump politically before the election in November. Many of these lies were quickly debunked, but that hasn’t stopped the false information from being repeated over and over. The left hopes these lies will continue to spread, but so far it doesn’t seem to be working since Trump’s approval numbers for his handling of the pandemic have gone up. But that doesn’t mean the left will give up their disinformation campaign. To help set the record straight, I’ve compiled the top ten lies that have been spread about Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic. There are certainly plenty more, and you are welcome to mention them in the comments.
10. Trump downplayed the mortality rate of the coronavirus
In early March, the World Health Organization said that 3.4 percent of coronavirus patients had died from the disease. “Globally, about 3.4% of reported COVID-19 (the disease spread by the virus) cases have died,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at a briefing. “By comparison, seasonal flu generally kills far fewer than 1% of those infected.”
Trump said this number was false, as the mortality rate was actually much less because their number didn’t take into account unreported cases. In an interview with Sean Hannity on March 4, Trump challenged WHO’s number. “Well, I think the 3.4% is really a false number,” Trump said, asserting that the actual mortality rate is “way under 1 percent.”
And Trump was right. He wasn’t downplaying the mortality rate, as has been suggested. As testing in the United States has increased, the mortality rate has decreased. The same is true worldwide.
Yet, there were so-called experts who greatly overestimated the mortality rate in order to spark fear and panic. MSNBC contributor Dr. Joseph Fair told a panel that up to 20 percent of the U.S. population might die from the coronavirus.
9. Trump lied when he said Google was developing a national coronavirus website
When President Trump declared the coronavirus a national emergency, he announced that Google was developing a website to direct people to coronavirus testing locations nationwide.
“I want to thank Google. Google is helping to develop a website, it’s going to be very quickly done, unlike websites of the past, to determine whether a test is warranted and to facilitate testing at a nearby convenient location,” Trump said during a press conference.
Google confirmed this in a tweet after Trump’s remarks, but the media seemed intent on calling Trump’s claim false. HuffPost literally called Trump’s claim a lie because the site was actually being developed by a subsidiary of Google’s parent company, Alphabet. This ultimately forced Google to confirm, again, that they were partnering with the federal government to develop a national coronavirus website. “Google is partnering with the US Government in developing a nationwide website that includes information about COVID-19 symptoms, risk and testing information,” Google said on Twitter.
After Google backed up Trump, he thanked them and ripped the media for spreading fake news. “I want to thank the people at Google and Google communications because as you know they substantiated what I said on Friday,” Trump said. “The head of Google, who is a great gentleman, called us and he apologized. I don’t know where the press got their fake news, but they got it someplace. As you know, this is from Google. They put out a release and you guys can figure it out yourselves and how that got out. And I’m sure you guys will apologize, but it would be great if we could get really give the news correctly. It’d be so, so wonderful.”
8. Trump “dissolved” the WH pandemic response office
Two days after Trump declared the coronavirus a national emergency, the Washington Post ran an opinion piece by Elizabeth Cameron, who ran the White House pandemic office under Obama, alleging that Trump had dissolved the office in 2018. She claimed because of this, “the federal government’s slow response to the coronavirus isn’t a surprise.”
This claim spread like wildfire, even though it was completely false. Days after WaPo ran the piece, they published another article by Tim Morrison, former senior director for counterproliferation and biodefense on the National Security Council, who debunked the allegation made by Cameron and other former Obama administration officials.
Direct, factual refutation of claim that the President disbanded his pandemic response team by the NSC official who led the biodefense mission.
The falsehood was widely reported and even stated as a fact by an NBC reporter in a question to the President. https://t.co/qTwfTfD0Mf
— John Noonan (@noonanjo) March 16, 2020
What good is there in spreading false information, as Elizabeth Cameron did? “This is Washington. It’s an election year,” Morrison laments. “Officials out of power want back into power after November. But the middle of a worldwide health emergency is not the time to be making tendentious accusations.”
7. Trump ignored early intel briefings on possible pandemic
The Washington Post again was the source of another bogus claim when they reported that intelligence agencies warned about a possible pandemic back in January and February and that Trump “failed to take action that might have slowed the spread of the pathogen.”
It was fake news. The Trump administration had begun aggressively addressing the coronavirus threat immediately after China reported the discovery of the coronavirus to the World Health Organization. In addition to implementing various precautionary travel restrictions, the administration fast-tracked the use of testing kits, set up a Coronavirus Task Force, and implemented a travel ban with China, several weeks before WHO declared the coronavirus a pandemic.
In actuality, it was Trump’s critics who weren’t taking the coronavirus situation seriously. Joe Biden even accused Trump of “fearmongering” and “xenophobia” for his travel ban. Even now, the Washington Post is suggesting the travel ban wasn’t enough.
6. Trump cut funding to the CDC & NIH
Back in February both Joe Biden and Mike Bloomberg (who hadn’t dropped out of the Democratic primary yet) accused President Trump of cutting funding to critical health agencies during a primary debate. “There’s nobody here to figure out what the hell we should be doing. And he’s defunded — he’s defunded Centers for Disease Control, CDC, so we don’t have the organization we need. This is a very serious thing,” Bloomberg claimed.
The Obama-Biden administration “increased the budget of the CDC. We increased the NIH budget. … He’s wiped all that out. … He cut the funding for the entire effort,” Biden claimed.
They were both wrong.
According to an Associated Press fact-check, proposed budget cuts never happened, and funding increased. They acknowledged that some public health experts believe that a bigger concern than White House budgets “is the steady erosion of a CDC grant program for state and local public health emergency preparedness,” but, they note, “that decline was set in motion by a congressional budget measure that predates Trump.”
The AP also noted that “The public health system has a playbook to follow for pandemic preparation — regardless of who’s president or whether specific instructions are coming from the White House. Those plans were put into place in anticipation of another flu pandemic, but are designed to work for any respiratory-borne disease.”
5. Trump “muzzled” Dr. Fauci
In late February, the New York Times claimed that the Trump administration had “muzzled” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), by preventing him from speaking publicly about the coronavirus without approval from the administration.
It wasn’t true. But, the claim was echoed throughout the mainstream media, and ultimately was brought up in a press briefing, and Trump was asked directly about it, and he let Dr. Fauci clear it up.
“I’ve never been muzzled, ever, and I’ve been doing this since Reagan,” he said. “I’m not being muzzled by this administration.”
Despite the fact this claim was debunked, Joe Biden kept repeating it as if it were true. “And, look, right now you have this president, hasn’t allowed his scientists to speak, number one,” Biden said on ABC’s This Week a couple days after Fauci said unequivocally he wasn’t being muzzled. “He has the vice president speaking, not the scientists who know what they’re talking about, like Fauci.”
Joe Biden just touted the debunked talking point that President Trump had muzzled Doctor Fauci form discussing the coronavirus.
This is what Fauci had to say about that claim yesterday:
“I’ve never been muzzled ever and I’ve been doing this since…Reagan.”
ROLL THE TAPE! pic.twitter.com/1HAcLl3qes
— Francis Brennan (Text TRUMP to 88022) (@FrancisBrennan) March 1, 2020
4. Trump didn’t act quickly and isn’t doing enough
If you listen to Democrats, Trump didn’t act quickly enough and is botching the government response. Joe Biden has tried to perpetuate this falsehood by giving press briefings telling Trump what he should be doing.
The big problem with that is that when Biden has offered his own plan, he simply took things that Trump had already done, said he should do those things, and pretended they were his own ideas.
In addition to this, one of the most significant actions taken by Trump, the travel ban with China, was actually opposed by Joe Biden, and Trump’s critics on the left. Unfortunately for them, WHO experts admitted Trump’s actions saved lives in the United States.
Fox News contributor Liz Peek noted back in February, “Even before a single case of the virus erupted organically in our country […] and even as the administration had acted preemptively and effectively to keep virus carriers out of our country, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg and others were eager to stoke fear and blame Donald Trump.”
Dr. Ronny Jackson, who served as White House physician from 2013 to 2018, also credited Trump for his decisive response to the coronavirus epidemic. “The president has done everything he needed to do in this case,” he said. “He’s acted quickly and decisively. He did what he always has done … he went with his instincts.”
Jackson added, “What’s going on in Italy and Iran is not going to happen here I think, because of the president’s quick and decisive actions. I think we are going to be more in line with what’s going on in South Korea and things of that nature.”
3. Trump told governors they were “on their own”
In a tweet sent last week, New York Times editorial board member Mara Gay claimed that during a conference call with governors about the coronavirus pandemic, President Trump told them they were “on their own” in getting the equipment they need. “‘Respirators, ventilators, all of the equipment — try getting it yourselves,’ Mr. Trump told the governors during the conference call, a recording of which was shared with The New York Times.”
She lied. Ms. Gay deliberately misrepresented Trump’s words. Trump actually told governors on the call: “Respirators, ventilators, all of the equipment — try getting it yourselves. We will be backing you, but try getting it yourselves. Point of sales, much better, much more direct if you can get it yourself.”
The false narrative that Trump had told governors they were on their own, essentially to expect no help from the federal government, spread like wildfire.
2. Trump turned down testing kits from WHO
A Politico hit piece from early March claimed that the World Health Organization offered the United States coronavirus testing kits, but Trump refused to accept them. This claim spread quickly, and Joe Biden even alluded to it during his March 15 debate with Bernie Sanders, claiming, “The World Health Organization offered the testing kits that they have available and to give it to us now. We refused them. We did not want to buy them.”
It wasn’t true. “No discussions occurred between WHO and CDC about WHO providing COVID-19 tests to the United States,” WHO spokeswoman Margaret Harris explained. “This is consistent with experience since the United States does not ordinarily rely on WHO for reagents or diagnostic tests because of sufficient domestic capacity.” According to WHO, its priority was to send testing kits to “countries with the weakest health systems.”
So, why did testing get off to a slow start in the United States? Ellie Bufkin at our sister site Townhall noted that “Testing in the United States was fraught with difficulty in large part due to the slow approval by the Food and Drug Administration to allow testing kits developed by private companies outside of the government-controlled CDC to be used at a local or national level. Those FDA policies are consistent with the Obama Administration’s response to H1N1 and Ebola in 2009 and 2014 respectively.”
1. Trump called the coronavirus “a hoax”
To this day the left (and the media) claim Trump called the coronavirus a hoax. He said no such thing. While the country was distracted by impeachment, the Trump administration was busy addressing the coronavirus outbreak, taking various measures to limit the spread of the virus in the United States. Impeachment quickly faded, so they decided to aggressively politicize his response to the coronavirus outbreak. Joe Biden even called Trump’s travel ban with China an overreaction, and accused him of trying to scare the public. “This is no time for Donald Trump’s record of hysteria and xenophobia ± hysterical xenophobia — and fearmongering to lead the way instead of science.”
President Trump responded to these allegations during a rally in South Carolina, calling the Democrats’ politicization of the coronavirus “the new hoax.” The media jumped on this line, claiming that Trump called the virus, not the Democrats’ reactions to it, a hoax. The lie spread like wildfire and Joe Biden even used the lie as a talking point on the stump. There was quite a stir when Politico’s story repeating the false claim that Trump called the virus a hoax was flagged by Facebook fact-checkers as fake news, but other fact-checkers couldn’t deny that the claim was false either.
_____
Matt Margolis is the author of Trumping Obama: How President Trump Saved Us From Barack Obama’s Legacy and the bestselling book The Worst President in History: The Legacy of Barack Obama. You can follow Matt on Twitter @MattMargolis
So in your faux not the news propaganda addled brain you have decided it was the Democrats new hoax that he said, and really that is it is a difference in including the Democrats in the hoax that makes him saying it is a hoax different? Have another chewable Clorox. And when you finished your Lysol inhalant and UV butt insertion tell me the rest is a lie also. You can lead a trump zombie to the truth but you can’t make them think.
The fascist played golf and held his fascist rallies while the US was overrun by the trump virus. Kinda’ like Nero fiddled while Rome burned.
Fartbook fact checkers? Surely you joke, that would be bratbart right?
“So in your faux not the news propaganda addled brain you have decided it was the Democrats new hoax ”
It was and any intelligent person could see that from the tapes. It was “a new hoax” There is only two excuses to not recognize that factafter looking at the evidence.
1) A person that must lie to protect a belief
2) A person that is not intelligent enough to recognize a lie that was created to alter the truth.
Pick 1,2, or both.
Sawadi-krap Sarge,
A guy who lives in Thailand and is so proud of it that he’s told us all he does, is clearly not worried about “fascism.”
if anybody cares, there’s ten thousand hits on google for “fascism” in Thailand. take a look.
or if that’s too much, just take a survey of how many times the Thailand army has lead a coup the past century:
https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/se-asia/thailand-coup-a-brief-history-of-past-military-coups-0
don’t lecture us here stateside in what a “fascist” is Sabai, you’re not one to worry about us back in the “Fatherland!”
Sgt Sabai, speaking of fascists, why don’t you ask the Thai army tyrants why they let the Lumpinee stadium stay open even after the government there imposed a lock-down?
https://www.bangkokpost.com/thailand/general/1892820/recent-covid-19-deaths-linked-to-lumpinee-boxing-stadium
no need to worry too much about Trump Sarge
Liberals no longer have any principles, merely improvisations which act as excuses for them filling their pie-holes. You can see that on these boards.
The Queen has spoken.
Everybody must bow and obey.
Let the truth be sacrificed.
Well duh! It’s not racism or xenophobia if Democrats do it. Only if Republicans do it. Democrats obtain “virtue” simply by being Democrats, not thru any works. Its a religious faith-based thing for them.
That is how Pelosi can advocate killing babies, even those a day or two away from delivery while still being a Good Catholic! Being a Democrat makes it all OK.
I know this sounds dumb, and it is, but this is how they think. Go figure.
Squeeky Fromm
Girl Reporter
“That is how Pelosi can advocate killing babies, even those a day or two away from delivery while still being a Good Catholic! Being a Democrat makes it all OK.”
That is wrong. Pelosi gets away with it because when in Church she has her fingers crossed. 🙂
Pelosi did not call the travel ban on China Racist.
Pelosi did not call for massing in Chinatown.
There was no testing set up for those returning from China.
Other than that, stop watching Fox News Jonathan and carry on.
Seriously?! I’ve seen and heard exactly what Pelosi said. Perhaps you missed it, but there’s nothing inaccurate in what Jonathan Turley has written here.
Pelosi did not call the travel ban on China Racist.
Pelosi did not call for massing in Chinatown.
There was no testing set up for those returning from China.
Ralph, though human Anon (btb, Jan F. and multiple other aliases) has the brain of a parrot and repeats phrases over and over again without knowing what they mean.
Those people who were let in were American citizens and green card holders. What a hypocrite!!!!!
Hy-Pelosi