The Dog Ate My Homework
So far, our President has excused his Administration’s tardiness in preparing for and mitigating the Covid 19 pandemic as follows:
· The Democrats were impeaching me.
· The Chinese were lying to me.
· The WHO was lying to me.
· We have been perfect in every way; we did everything right.
· I knew it all along and fully understood everything.
· It was a hoax and just a flu.
· Nobody could have predicted or prepared for it.
The reality was:
· US intelligence identified and reported it in the middle of November. ‘
· The head of the Chinese CDC called the head of the US CDC the third day of January to tell him about the spread of the new virus.
· The head of HHS told Trump in mid January about the oncoming virus.
· The first case in the US was in the middle of January.
· Joe Biden and Ron Klain, who headed our response to Ebola, each wrote and published op eds in the latter part of January warning of the coming pandemic and the need and steps to prepare.
· One of his chief economic advisors wrote him a memo in late January detailing the loss of human life and disastrous effects upon the economy if he failed to act.
During January and February and the first part of March, the only major action taken by the Trump Administration to prepare for the pandemic, which was devastating China, then Iran, then Italy, then Spain was to ban foreign travellers coming from China, overlooking the fact it was coming into the US through our own citizens returning from Italy. While South Korea, Taiwan, Germany and Singapore tested, traced, quarantined, hospitalized and stopped the spread of Covid 19 in their countries, Trump just denied it was coming or that it was serious despite every highly visible evidence to the contrary. He might have put off some of his golf games and campaign rallies, firing imaginary enemies and tweet storms to his base, and other Trumpian diversions to pay attention to what has become the greatest pandemic since the Spanish Flu (which started in Kansas in 1918 and the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression began on Wall Street in 1929.
When Covid 19 began to really show its deadly force in the US in the form of hospitalizations and deaths beginning in the middle of March, we had tests that did not work, an insufficient supply of ventilators, masks and personal protective equipment for our health care workforce. We still lack adequate testing, contact tracing, tracking data. So hot spots spring up from South Dakota to Georgia to Idaho catching their residents unawares.
Our nation’s doctors, the nurses, the Governors and the Mayors are doing extraordinary work to beat back the havoc of this virus. The President of the United States spends his days watching TV, tweeting falsehoods and lying to the news media and anyone else, who will actually still listen to him. The virus is sweeping through our nation’s nursing homes and killing those in its path; the staff are not tested, and they have no or insufficient protective gear to protect themselves and other nursing room residents from the virus, and our President is defunding the World Health Organization that warned the world this was coming, and now he is encouraging neo-Nazi right wing nuts besieging state capitols with demands to open the churches, the factories, the golf courses and the sports arenas.
From now `til the November election, we should fully expect the President will take no responsibility or accountability and will create false narratives to blame anyone and everyone else for his in-actions and lies to the public. We must tune out his lies and take responsibility ourselves to support those Governors from the East, West and industrial mid-West who are banding together by region to take on the really hard and untested tasks of protecting the health ofs their citizens while re-opening their state’ economies.
Reference: David From, The Atlantic (April 7, 2020)
Prepared by: Lucien Wulsin
4/17/20