Tag: Trump mishandled pandemic response

At White House coronavirus briefings, rescue efforts are extensive but often aspirational

Washington Post logoBad news tends to build up on pandemic days right until prime time, when President Trump and the coronavirus task force gather in the White House briefing room to tamp it down.

There, from the podium, generous quantities of medical supplies are distributed. The innovative forces of American science and industry are marshaling to defeat the enemy and make testing widely available. The economy gets the intensive care it needs for America to quickly recover. The “medical war,” as Trump calls it, is being won.

These pronouncements and pledges have turned out, again and again, to be a description of the administration’s aspirational response to the pandemic, not the one doctors, nurses and stricken families are reporting from the front. Continue reading.

America is in a depression. The challenge now is to make it short-lived.

Washington Post logoEconomists say the U.S. unemployment rate is now 13 percent, the worst since the Great Depression.

More than 17 million Americans have filed for unemployment benefits in the past four weeks, a rapid and unprecedented deterioration in the U.S. economy that the nation has decided is necessary to combat the deadly coronavirus by keeping as many people as possible at home.

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell said Thursday that the U.S. economy is in an emergency and is deteriorating “with alarming speed.” His remarks came shortly after the central bank unveiled over $2 trillion in new loans to keep the economy afloat, while much of the nation goes into a lockdown.

The nation has not experienced this magnitude of layoffs and economic contraction since the Great Depression, many experts say, and recovery is unlikely to be swift. President Trump and Congress are racing to pass more relief money, but they failed to strike a deal Thursday on the details. Meanwhile, the $2 trillion package Congress approved last month is barely starting to get out as states and federal agencies that have been gutted for years struggle to process millions of aid applications from small businesses and the newly jobless. Continue reading.

Trump’s Testing Travesty

The Trump administration’s development and distribution of coronavirus testing has been an unmitigated disaster, marked by technical issues, bureaucratic problems and lack of leadership. Don’t take our word for it — as Dr. Fauci said, “Yeah, it is a failing, let’s admit it.”
Now, instead of taking responsibility, Trump is trying to pass blame on to states and hospitals  who are begging for his help getting more tests. He mocked them, saying, “We’re the federal government, we’re not supposed to stand on street corners doing testing.”

Consider this: the U.S. and South Korea had their first confirmed coronavirus case on the same day — January 20. But the U.S. remains far behind South Korea on per capita coronavirus testing. Why? Because Trump delayed efforts to expand coronavirus testing for nearly two months, at enormous cost to our country, wasting precious time needed to stop the spread of the virus.

First, Trump repeatedly downplayed the testing supply shortage, promising in early March that “anybody that wants a test can get a test” when that simply was not true. While he falsely claimed that “testing has been going very smooth,” labs faced a huge testing backlog and states still awaited testing equipment.
Trump’s failure to immediately address the testing shortage had dire consequences. Health experts and local officials confirmed that his botched rollout of testing prevented them from knowing the spread of the virus early, rendering it virtually impossible to contain.
Trump’s testing travesty is the genie that can’t be put back in the bottle. His failure to test allowed the virus to spread rapidly and undetected. Because wide scale testing was not available, more people are sick, more people have died, and there is exponentially higher disruption to our economy and lives.

Continue reading “Trump’s Testing Travesty”

Donald Trump Has Stake In Hydroxychloroquine Drugmaker: Report

The president has repeatedly touted the anti-malaria drug as a coronavirus treatment despite a lack of medical evidence.

President Donald Trump reportedly owns a stake in a company that produces hydroxychloroquine, the anti-malaria drug he has repeatedly touted as a coronavirus treatment even though his experts say there’s no strong evidence it works.

Trump “has a small personal financial interest” in Sanofi, the French drugmaker that makes Plaquenil, the brand-name version of hydroxychloroquine, The New York Times reported Monday.

In addition, Sanofi’s largest shareholders include a mutual fund company run by major Republican donor Ken Fisher, the paper said. Trump’s three family trusts, as of last year, each had investments in a mutual fund whose largest holding was Sanofi, according to the Times. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross also had ties to the drugmaker, the Times reported. Continue reading.

Why does Trump call an 86-year-old unproven drug a game-changer against coronavirus?

Washington Post logoMedical experts say there is not enough evidence that anti-malarials chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine benefit patients with covid-19

The lack of vaccines and treatment for the novel coronavirus has allowed it to sweep the planet virtually unchecked. With a regimen of hunkering down and hand-washing the only effective way to slow its path, national leaders are desperate to find a medicine that could have an effect. But President Trump’s cheerleading for anti-malarial drugs has raised hopes beyond what is supported by the scientific facts.

>Bayer invented the medicine chloroquine in 1934, and it has been used for decades to treat malaria throughout the world. Hydroxychloroquine was invented during World War II to provide an alternative with fewer side effects.

Hydroxychloroquine, sold under the brand name Plaquenil, is also used by patients with lupus and rheumatoid arthritis to control inflammation. Both drugs, chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, are available as generics, but public and political interest has caused runs, hoarding and severe shortages in recent weeks. Continue reading.  Free article

Messaging guru explains how the left can mobilize righteous anger and fight Trump’s claims on ‘the economy’

AlterNet logoAfter months of denial regarding the spread COVID-19, Donald Trump first embraced the role of being a “wartime president,” then shifted again to wanting the war over immediately, saying, “We don’t want the cure to be worse than the disease.” A chorus of conservative voices quickly echoed him, suggesting older Americans should be happy to die to save the economy “for their children.” Although Trump has temporarily retreated on that front, he appeared to feint toward that message again this week, and we’ll be hearing echoes of it again, repeatedly.

This new line of argument vividly reminded me of the “South Park” episode “Margaritaville,” discussed in striking fashion in Anat Shenker-Osorio’s 2012 book, “Don’t Buy It: The Trouble with Talking Nonsense about the Economy,” which I enthusiastically reviewed at the time. “Don’t Buy It” was based on three years of research into how economists, journalists, advocates, think tanks and others think and communicate about the economy, and the breadth of Shenker-Osorio’s research made it all the more striking how well that episode captured a fundamental truth about our pervasive economic confusion — a confusion that’s now deadlier than ever.

That alone was enough reason to want to talk to her. But as it happens, Shenker-Osorio has also just released a COVID-19 messaging guide, which built on the race-class narrative project that I wrote about in 2018. “In moments of crisis, new narratives, new policies and new social behaviors are established,” the guide begins. “How we act and what we say in this moment can help define perceptions, assumptions and policy preferences in our communities, states and country.” Continue reading.

Trump Urges Coronavirus Patients to Take Unproven Drug

New York Times logoHe said the government was putting millions of doses of the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine into an emergency stockpile even though it has not been approved for Covid-19 treatment.

President Trump said on Saturday that the federal government was placing millions of doses of a malaria drug in the federal stockpile of emergency medical supplies to make it available for coronavirus patients, even though the drug has not been approved for Covid-19 treatment and his top coronavirus advisers have warned that more study is needed to determine its safety and efficacy.

Though advisers, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, have cautioned many times that more data is needed on the drug, hydroxychloroquine, Mr. Trump, in a White House briefing, went so far as to urge patients to take it.

“What do you have to lose? Take it,” the president said. “I really think they should take it. But it’s their choice. And it’s their doctor’s choice or the doctors in the hospital. But hydroxychloroquine. Try it, if you’d like.” Continue reading.

How Trump’s attempts to win the daily news cycle feed a chaotic coronavirus response

Washington Post logoPresident Trump began the seven-day stretch threatening — and then reneging on — a quarantine of the New York region. He ended it by announcing recommendations for everyone to wear face masks but stressed he would opt against sporting one himself.

In the days in between, Trump announced a 30-day extension of stringent social distancing guidelines (March 29), called into a freewheeling “Fox & Friends” gripe-a-thon (Monday), presented a dire assessment of how many Americans are expected to die of the coronavirus (Tuesday), launched a military operation against drug cartels (Wednesday) and stoked a feud with a senior senator from hard-hit New York (Thursday).

The novel coronavirus has decimated the economy, turned hospitals into battlefields and upended the daily lives of every American. But in Trump’s White House, certain symptoms remain: a president who governs as if producing and starring in a reality television show, with each day a new episode and each news cycle his own creation, a successive installment to be conquered. Continue reading.

The U.S. was beset by denial and dysfunction as the coronavirus raged

Washington Post logoFrom the Oval Office to the CDC, political and institutional failures cascaded through the system and opportunities to mitigate the pandemic were lost.

By the time Donald Trump proclaimed himself a wartime president — and the coronavirus the enemy — the United States was already on course to see more of its people die than in the wars of Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq combined.

The country has adopted an array of wartime measures never employed collectively in U.S. history — banning incoming travelers from two continents, bringing commerce to a near-halt, enlisting industry to make emergency medical gear, and confining 230 million Americans to their homes in a desperate bid to survive an attack by an unseen adversary.

Despite these and other extreme steps, the United States will likely go down as the country that was supposedly best prepared to fight a pandemic but ended up catastrophically overmatched by the novel coronavirus, sustaining heavier casualties than any other nation. Continue reading.

Decentralized leadership raises questions about Trump coronavirus response

The Hill logoThe rotating cast of officials appearing behind President Trump to detail the government’s response to the coronavirus are leading to new criticisms that they reflect a scattered approach from the White House that too often leaves states fending for themselves.

Top Trump administration officials say the appearances by a broad range of administration officials shows the “all of government” undertaken to combat the coronavirus.

But some current and former government officials see a disconnected strategy where it can be unclear who’s in charge of what or whether there is a coordinated long-term plan. Continue reading.