Reason # 96: COVID Redux
Why do we need to defeat Donald Trump and ensure that a Democrat occupies the White House?
When I was a child our primary defense against new infectious disease was four blocks from my home. Stretching between Bay Street on Staten Island and the Narrows, entering New York Harbor, the U.S. Quarantine Station medically isolated and treated infected sailors on ships stopping in New York City. Fortunately, we have a much more robust system in place today. Government agencies track the incidence of diseases here and abroad and send out warning messages when new threats are detected. They also give advice to the President on how severe the threat is and what should be done about it. The problem of what happens when government flubs the warning was exemplified by the out-of-control AIDS epidemic.
We have already discussed, in great detail, the many failures of Donald Trump, his administration and Republicans generally, across our land, in dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic.
They did not pay attention to early reports of the disease in China. They did not react quickly to keep the disease off our shores. Once here, they failed to support public health measures to tamp down the epidemic and save lives. They mocked mask-wearing. They opposed bans on social gatherings: going to work, church, school and entertainment venues.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-020-00977-7
On this issue Trump broke his pattern and even completed an articulate sentence. “Shutdowns cause, I think probably, or possibly, much bigger problems than even the virus itself.”
Republicans closely followed Donald Trump’s bonkers posts on various ineffective and dangerous COVID treatments and one person died of complications.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7685699/
Once the vaccines came available, they began espousing crack-pot anti-vaxxer paranoia and tried to block government effort to mandate vaccination in schools, hospitals and the military.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/31/us/politics/republicans-covid-vaccine-mandate-fact-check.html
As a direct result hundreds of thousands died unnecessarily.
Will Trump and the Grand Olde Party do any better in case of emergence of a dangerous variant of COVID-19, influenza, bird flu or other infection, if reelected? How could they? Process improvement depends on gathering accurate information, identifying areas for potential improvement and brainstorming to craft better responses in future.
None of this is possible with Trump or the sycophantic modern GOP. Donald Trump will never, ever admit that he was wrong; never, ever apologize for a mistake or take responsibility. He insists that his response to COVID was outstanding.
“We have done a great job.” September 29, 2020.
https://www.factcheck.org/2020/10/timeline-of-trumps-covid-19-comments/
There is accordingly no room for improvement.
What he does have is resentment. Anyone, including Anthony Fauci, who had the temerity to criticize his statements or his actions, has been cast out into eternal darkness, bearing nasty new nicknames. In a normal political party, the “loyal opposition” can set things straight by internal self-criticism. Modern Republicans have given up any hope of this option. They will slavishly agree with almost anything their leader advances, no matter how asinine.
Trump and his enablers choose, still today, not to look at the data. Instead, they focus on so called “gain of function” virology research, supposedly gone awry, allowing Chinese scientists, funded by the U.S. to toy with viruses, in the process creating a lethal Frankenvirus that then escaped into the population. This false flag allows them to deflect blame from their catastrophic failure and castigate Democrats and Anthony Fauci for allowing the escape of a killer “China virus” amongst us.
Problem: there is no evidence to support this conspiratorial theory nonsense and plenty of evidence that COVID-19 evolved from the same natural processes that result in new viral strains each year on rural Chinese farms.
Too general. OK, let’s get more specific. Trump feels betrayed by disloyalty from “his” scientists and wants his revenge. He also wants to replace independent scientists and bureaucrats at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the CDC etc. with loyalist doctors, scientists and administrators. Why? Republicans don’t want a repeat of 2021, when Democrats cared more for saving lives than profits and closed down businesses to prevent spread of the lethal virus. For Republicans, dollars are more important than lives. They seriously preferred to let millions die and deal with the pandemic by allowing “herd immunity” to solve the social dilemma. Problem is, they had no idea what they were talking about; no idea that their flaccid inertia would result in cities paralyzed, hospitals under siege and bodies piling up in refrigerated morgue containers. What’s more, they simply didn’t care.
The party mocked masking; insisted that kids be allowed to go to school (and bring the lethal virus home to grandma and grandpa), rebelliously gathered in churches, listened to Donald’s nonsensical nostrums demanding anti-malarial medications, worm medicines and gargled antiseptics. And when big pharma came to the rescue with miraculously effective vaccines, Republicans in high places pushed back, denying that public health considerations could mandate vaccinations of students, soldiers and medical personnel.
Have Republicans learned anything from the tragedy of COVID? Not a jot. How do we know?
Last week, the brightest of the rightest were convened by the new President of Stanford University for supposed civil discourse on pandemic science.
Fortunately, Michael Hiltzik of the October 15, 2024Los Angeles Times reported on the farcical event –“ Column: Can Stanford tell the difference between scientific fact and fiction? Its pandemic conference raises doubts.”
He reports how there were frequent assertions echoing Donald Trump, that the social measures taken e.g. masking and school closures were worse than the disease itself. Wilk Wilkinson, an invited blogger, criticized public health leaders who “focused very narrowly on deaths from COVID and often it came at the expense of other social values” like “being able to visit others” or “putting children in schools”. Bryce Nichols asserted that “the pandemic was caused by reckless research and a lab accident.” Remember Scott Atlas, Trump’s Stanford advisor? He was there, spieling that social measures “failed to stop the dying, they failed to stop the spread -that’s the data.” All untrue. Such measures slowed spread and prevented many deaths. Marty Makary was also there. Remember him, the guy from Johns Hopkins, who kept predicting that the pandemic was being brought under control by natural immunity.
Hiltzik characterizes the Stanford Conference as “a conference in which conspiratorial delusions and outright falsehoods were treated as deserving the same respect as scientifically validated research”.
This is the kind of medical science we are going to see a lot more of if Trump is reelected and Project 2025 can be implemented.
Project 2025 is a frightening danger to independent science. It seeks to “limit the power of agency officials by making it easier to fire them”. It also seeks to punish by cutting NIH’s budget. Take that you impudent scientists! Certain types of research, including that on fetal tissues are specifically targeted.
As reported in Politico, “Republicans want to overhaul the National Institutes of Health.” They seek to downsize the giant agency, appoint jobs there politically and direct research grant direction.
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/09/30/republicans-covid-pandemic-nih-plan-00181512
Politico has also described the threat to the Centers for Disease Control, our first line of defense against infectious diseases.
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/03/11/cdc-dismantle-trump-administration-00146035
Republicans would pay back the CDC for its failure to support Trump COVID crazy, by butchering it. Picture the CDC as a side of beef in a freezer. A figure in a blood-stained apron is hacking at it. The first cut is the deepest – CDC is cut in half! One remnant is the truncated early warning system that collects data on the incidence of diseases. But it is now totally separated off from a second CDC division, that would be further hamstrung, so that it could no longer be capable of what Project 2025 calls “social engineering”, advising terrible things like vaccination and sound medical advice to the American public. We will all be in considerably more danger if we allow CDC to be vivisected in this brutal fashion.
Many unfortunates lost their lives during COVID because of just plain craziness, combined with Republican values that favor profit over human life. If you are foolish enough to vote for Donald Trump you are putting yourself, your family and your country at much advanced personal risk.
Post-script: Modern Republicans did not invent public health lunacy. In 1858, a Staten Island mob burned down the quarantine station,
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Fred Grannis
October 18, 2024