Peter Navarro, Mr. Trump’s trade adviser, warned that a pandemic could cost the United States trillions of dollars and put millions of Americans at risk of illness or death. © Doug Mills/The New York Times
New York Times: He Could Have Seen What Was Coming: Behind Trump’s Failure on the Virus
WASHINGTON — “Any way you cut it, this is going to be bad,” a senior medical adviser at the Department of Veterans Affairs, Dr. Carter Mecher, wrote on the night of Jan. 28, in an email to a group of public health experts scattered around the government and universities. “The projected size of the outbreak already seems hard to believe.”
A week after the first coronavirus case had been identified in the United States, and six long weeks before President Trump finally took aggressive action to confront the danger the nation was facing — a pandemic that is now forecast to take tens of thousands of American lives — Dr. Mecher was urging the upper ranks of the nation’s public health bureaucracy to wake up and prepare for the possibility of far more drastic action.
“You guys made fun of me screaming to close the schools,” he wrote to the group, which called itself “Red Dawn,” an inside joke based on the 1984 movie about a band of Americans trying to save the country after a foreign invasion. “Now I’m screaming, close the colleges and universities.”
Read more ....
WNU Editor: This is a debate that every responsible country is going to have when this is over. I know in the country that I live (Canada), it was slower than the U.S. in responding to this pandemic, and we are paying a dear price for it. Not surprising, some Canadians (including this blogger) are asking questions. The country that I am from, Russia, has been even slower, and they are now in a crisis situation .... Kremlin warns of huge influx of Moscow patients as coronavirus toll climbs (Reuters). As for the U.S., before drawing any conclusions one needs to first look at the measures enacted by the White House and their timeline .... The Real Coronavirus Chronology Shows Trump Was On Top Of It While Biden Was Mocking The Danger (The Federalist). So what is my take? With hindsight, I wish President Trump was quicker in closing the border. But he hesitated after he issued his travel ban on China. Why the hesitation? I am speculating now, but my guess is that he listened to the wrong people, and he ignored his original instincts that closing the border was the right thing to do. So who did he listen to? He listened to the experts at the CDC who were assuring everyone in late January and February that the risk was low. He listened to the World Health Organization's recommendations that closing the border was useless, and that it would not stop the spread of this outbreak .... WHO Director General Praises China's Response To The Wuhan Coronavirus. Blasts The World's Travel And Trade Restrictions On China Ban And Not Sharing Information (February 4, 2020). WHO was also telling everyone that the outbreak was under control .... WHO Says The Wuhan Coronavirus Outbreak Is Not A Pandemic (February 4, 2020). President Trump also had trouble addressing the massive opposition to his China travel ban from the media (New York Times included) and from his political opponents who were using his restrictions to accuse him of xenophobia and racism. It should also be noted that President Trump received little if any support from fellow Republican during this time.
From mid-February to the second week of March more travel restrictions were implemented, as well as the establishment of a task-force lead by Vice-President Pence to address the coronavirus crisis. But if there is a date that I would say changed everything in the U.S., it would be March 11. The World Health Organization, after resisting for weeks the enormous pressure to call the Covid-19 outbreak a pandemic, finally relented on March 11. The NBA had their first positive test for a player later in the evening, where the immediate decision was then made (to the shock of everyone) to cancel the season. The next day, on March 12, President Trump imposed travel restrictions on Europe and elsewhere. He was still heavily criticized for that decision. On March 13, President Trump declared a national emergency, and nothing has been the same since. For a person who is accused of not seeing the pandemic, when one looks at what he was actually doing, a different picture emerges. But like I said. When this is all over, the real debate will begin.
WNU Editor: Since January 20th this blog has made over 600 posts on the Wuhan Coronavirus outbreak/Covid-19 Pandemic. If anyone wants to go down memory lane, those 600 posts are below. If I say so myself, some of it is fascinating reading.
Pandemic (January, 2020)
Wuhan Coronavirus Outbreak (January 21 - February 13, 2020)
Covid-19 (February 11, 2020 to present)
16 comments:
"But he hesitated after he issued his travel ban on China. Why the hesitation?"
Part of the reason is that every Democrat and others were calling him racist or xenophobe for closing the border with China.
"From mid-February to the second week of March more travel restrictions were implemented,"
And Romney, Mittens, cried.
NYC pols on the Chinese New Year parade March 2, 2020
Oxiris Barbot, NYC Health Commissioner Mar 2nd: "The risk for New Yorkers is low - and that our preparedness as a city is very high. There is no reason not to take the subway, not to take the bus, not to go out to you favorite restaurant and CERTAINLY not to miss the [Chinese New Year] Parade next Sunday".
NY State Sen. John Liu Mar 2nd: "There's really no need to panic and to avoid activities [Chinese New Year] that we always do as New Yorkers. We are a hardy people. As an Asian American I've been somewhat disturbed if not outright appalled at some of the comments or gestures that I have seen. Diseases originate from anywhere or from particular places in the world"
NY State Sen. Brian Kavanagh Mar 2nd: "Its very important that we recognize that this holiday and that this festival [Chinese New Year Parade] is of tremendous significance for many communities on our state and its uh, very important that we ensure that uh, we don't have misinformation and many in the media have been covering uh, this issue uh, as if its a terrible plague that people have to avoid"
Twitter/fake news fact checks:
The Trump admin did NOT cut funding for the CDC. Funding for the CDC has increased every year he's been in office.
Trump did NOT get rid of the of the pandemic unit at the NSC, he moved it to another division with a different title. (CI-ICU)
Trump did NOT refuse to accept testing kits from WHO. WHO does not even sell testing kits. We built our own kits like every other country. The test kits were slowed down but that is being fixed - as is in evidence by the increased testing.
Trump has NOT muzzle the scientists. China did. Our scientists are on TV every single day.
Trump did NOT tell governors that they are on their own with ventilator purchases. He said that the feds are backing them up if they can't procure them on their own.
Trump did NOT call Chinese coronavirus a hoax. He called the Left's attempt to politicize the virus against him a hoax. Which they did and are doing.
The American people DO approve of the way the Trump admin is handling the Chinese coronavirus. ABC news poll: 55% approve. Harris poll: 56% approve. That would be a majority.
Trump DID say Google was working with them toward creating a virus testing website for all Americans. The press said Google had no plans to do this. That was fake news. Trump rightly called them out.
U.S. intelligence was issuing warnings about the contagion in late November. And George W. Bush, nobody’s idea of a bright filament, saw the coming danger lucidly in 2005, when he told the country a new pandemic was an unavoidable certainty. Trump can claim the virus was invisible, but only if he will admit his blindness was self-imposed. As the press has demonstrated again and again, Trump routinely downplayed or dismissed its danger, averting his eyes to the coming cataclysm. Actually, Trump has been inconsistent on coronavirus’ visibility. On February 27, three weeks before Trump started to brand the virus as the invisible enemy, he saw it clearly enough to assert that, “One day it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.” (As long as we’re charting Trump’s fluctuating vision, let it be noted that at his March 17 presser he asserted that, “I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic.”)
“The President and the Federal Government are doing an excellent job. When they say the death toll isn’t going to be as high as reported, they (the opposition) act like they’re sad because it’s lower. I think they are (Press Conferences) wonderful.” West Virginia Resident, C Span.
Yeah. Russ, after you pick up your gubmint stipend, drop and give me twenty.
horseshit anon!
Democrats have criticized President Donald Trump for his administration’s response to the new coronavirus, making claims about cuts to public health programs and the silencing of government experts. But they haven’t always gotten their facts right:
It’s true that the president’s budget proposals have consistently called for reduced funding for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, but Congress hasn’t enacted those cuts. Some Democrats have correctly said Trump “tried” to implement such cuts, while others wrongly claimed he “slashed funding of the CDC” or “cut the funding,” in the words of Democratic presidential candidates Mike Bloomberg and Joe Biden, respectively.
Biden said Trump “tried to defund the NIH.” Trump did propose cutting NIH funding, but lawmakers instead have enacted increases.
THE DEMS IN CONGRESS WOULOD NOT ALLOW THE CUTS THAT ORANGE APE WANTED
Still pedaling lies Lapides. When are you going to tell the truth?
And 10:08 drops another debunked mouse turd.
/how was the burger king drive-thru line today?
Kiss the gunner's daughter Russ!
I got a deuce and a half worth's of tater's that need a peelin'!
The Debunked Mouse forgets that the CDC has 3 branches. The mouse is a liar, forgetful or worse. It does not want to admit which branch of budget was proposed to have its budget cut. I gave the mouse the table of organization for the CDC 3 times.
Plus the mouse ignores that Obama admin recommended cuts to the CDC.
If you look up mouse on quora you see how hideous, the mouse is and realize the mouse cannot be reasoned with. Either parts are missing or the mouse makes Archie look like a saint.
The virus original strain was found in US and Australia according to this Cambridge University and German geneticists study.
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3079491/deadly-coronavirus-comes-three-variants-researchers-find
I live with fools but there's hope and faith people
I warned of Trump’s attack on science. But I never predicted the horror that lay ahead | Ariel Dorfman
“¡Abajo la inteligencia! ¡Viva la muerte!” Those infamous words – “Down with intelligence! Long live death!” – were pronounced in 1936 by General Millán Astray, a fascist general who was a mentor and friend of Francisco Franco, soon to be Spain’s dictator for over four decades. They were part of a ranting speech Millán delivered at the University of Salamanca celebrating the insurrection against the Spanish Republic that heralded the dark years that were on the horizon.
I recalled these barbarous words with trepidation back in October of 2017 when I began tracking down the ways in which Donald Trump, in only the first 10 endless months of what was already then his endless government, was waging a disquieting war on science and the truth. In an online essay for the New York Review of Books, I warned of the “lethal consequences” that this offensive would entail, the millions of lives that would be shortened.
At that point what worried me was his assault on environmental and labor laws, the ways in which he was draining every government department of experts, the reckless evisceration of advisory councils, the proposed budgetary cuts to scientific research, the attacks on vaccinations and the health system and medical knowhow behind it, his obtuse climate change denials.
Observers have focused on his botched actions and confusing inactions, the Niagara of misinformation that spews daily from his mouth. It has been revealed that there were more than enough warnings, memos and red flags by January of this year to warrant urgent preparations that were never put in place and, scandalously, that Trump’s oblivious and careless acolytes dismantled in early 2018 the team in charge of handling precisely this sort of disastrous disease, firing its most experienced members. The latest scene in this tragic farce of capriciousness is Trump’s insistent demand that hydroxychloroquine be used to combat Covid-19. Despite this anti-malarial remedy not having been tested with objective standards nor its side-effects sufficiently vetted, he treats it as a miracle drug, harking back, perhaps, to when he announced that “one day – it’s like a miracle – [the virus] will disappear”. Magical thinking is to be expected in religion, literature and among audiences at shows where conjurers pull rabbits out of hats, but not as a substitute for professional medicine and settled science.
“What do you have to lose?” Trump recently reiterated at one of his interminable press conferences.
Some answers: raising false hope? Wasted resources and time? Lives lost?
WASHINGTON — “Any way you cut it, this is going to be bad,” a senior medical adviser at the Department of Veterans Affairs, Dr. Carter Mecher, wrote on the night of Jan. 28, in an email to a group of public health experts scattered around the government and universities. “The projected size of the outbreak already seems hard to believe.”
A week after the first coronavirus case had been identified in the United States, and six long weeks before President Trump finally took aggressive action to confront the danger the nation was facing — a pandemic that is now forecast to take tens of thousands of American lives — Dr. Mecher was urging the upper ranks of the nation’s public health bureaucracy to wake up and prepare for the possibility of far more drastic action.
“You guys made fun of me screaming to close the schools,” he wrote to the group, which called itself “Red Dawn,” an inside joke based on the 1984 movie about a band of Americans trying to save the country after a foreign invasion. “Now I’m screaming, close the colleges and universities.”
His was hardly a lone voice. Throughout January, as Mr. Trump repeatedly played down the seriousness of the virus and focused on other issues, an array of figures inside his government — from top White House advisers to experts deep in the cabinet departments and intelligence agencies — identified the threat, sounded alarms and made clear the need for aggressive action.
The president, though, was slow to absorb the scale of the risk and to act accordingly, focusing instead on controlling the message, protecting gains in the economy and batting away warnings from senior officials. It was a problem, he said, that had come out of nowhere and could not have been foreseen.
Even after Mr. Trump took his first concrete action at the end of January — limiting travel from China — public health often had to compete with economic and political considerations in internal debates, slowing the path toward belated decisions to seek more money from Congress, obtain necessary supplies, address shortfalls in testing and ultimately move to keep much of the nation at home.
Unfolding as it did in the wake of his impeachment by the House and in the midst of his Senate trial, Mr. Trump’s response was colored by his suspicion of and disdain for what he viewed as the “Deep State” — the very people in his government whose expertise and long experience might have guided him more quickly toward steps that would slow the virus, and likely save lives.
Decision-making was also complicated by a long-running dispute inside the administration over how to deal with China. The virus at first took a back seat to a desire not to upset Beijing during trade talks, but later the impulse to score points against Beijing left the world’s two leading powers further divided as they confronted one of the first truly global threats of the 21st century.
The shortcomings of Mr. Trump’s performance have played out with remarkable transparency as part of his daily effort to dominate television screens and the national conversation.
But dozens of interviews with current and former officials and a review of emails and other records revealed many previously unreported details and a fuller picture of the roots and extent of his halting response as the deadly virus spread:
The National Security Council office responsible for tracking pandemics received intelligence reports in early January predicting the spread of the virus to the United States, and within weeks was raising options like keeping Americans home from work and shutting down cities the size of Chicago. Mr. Trump would avoid such steps until March.
Mr. Azar publicly announced in February that the government was establishing a “surveillance” system in five American cities to measure the spread of the virus and enable experts to project the next hot spots. It was delayed for weeks. The slow start of that plan, on top of the well-documented failures to develop the nation’s testing capacity, left administration officials with almost no insight into how rapidly the virus was spreading. “We were flying the plane with no instruments,” one official said.
By the third week in February, the administration’s top public health experts concluded they should recommend to Mr. Trump a new approach that would include warning the American people of the risks and urging steps like social distancing and staying home from work. But the White House focused instead on messaging and crucial additional weeks went by before their views were reluctantly accepted by the president — time when the virus spread largely unimpeded.
When Mr. Trump finally agreed in mid-March to recommend social distancing across the country, effectively bringing much of the economy to a halt, he seemed shellshocked and deflated to some of his closest associates. One described him as “subdued” and “baffled” by how the crisis had played out. An economy that he had wagered his re-election on was suddenly in shambles.
He only regained his swagger, the associate said, from conducting his daily White House briefings, at which he often seeks to rewrite the history of the past several months. He declared at one point that he “felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic,” and insisted at another that he had to be a “cheerleader for the country,” as if that explained why he failed to prepare the public for what was coming.
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