Tag: Trump mishandling pandemic crisis

How a Trump order led to a huge coronavirus outbreak among workers

AlterNet logoOn April 26, a blog post written by John Tyson, chairman of Tyson Foods, caused a flurry of headlines that speculated a meat shortage was on the horizon due to stay-at-home orders across the country to flatten the curve.

“As pork, beef and chicken plants are being forced to close, even for short periods of time, millions of pounds of meat will disappear from the supply chain,” Tyson wrote. “As a result, there will be limited supply of our products available in grocery stores until we are able to reopen our facilities that are currently closed.”

Two days later, an April 28 executive order by the Trump administration — by way of Trump invoking the Defense Production Act (DPA) — encouraged meat plants to reopen. Nearly a month later, and more than half of the 30 meat processing plants that were closed have reopened. Yet all has not gone well: according to a Washington Post analysis, the number of coronaviruses cases among Tyson workers has gone from under 1,600 a month ago to more than 7,000. Continue reading.

Trump doubles down on conspiracy theory about woman’s death, ignoring grieving widower’s plea for peace

Washington Post logoPresident Trump and the White House on Tuesday continued to promote a baseless conspiracy theory about a woman’s 2001 death, ignoring her grieving widower’s plea for peace and putting renewed pressure on social media companies about the president’s toxic use of their platforms.

Twitter issued a public apology to the family of Lori Klausutis, whose death Trump has repeatedly weaponized to attack ­MSNBC host Joe Scarborough. But the social media company rejected a request from her widower, Timothy J. Klausutis, to delete Trump’s conspiracy-laden tweetsaccusing Scarborough of a debunked murder plot, saying his wife “deserves better.”

“We are deeply sorry about the pain these statements, and the attention they are drawing, are causing the family,” Twitter said in a statement Tuesday. “We’ve been working to expand existing product features and policies so we can more effectively address things like this going forward, and we hope to have those ­changes in place shortly.” Continue reading.

Taxpayers paid to develop remdesivir but will have no say when Gilead sets the price

Washington Post logoCritics say government deserves more credit for tens of millions in public money spent to develop coronavirus treatment

The drug that buoyed expectations for a coronavirus treatment and drew international attention for Gilead Sciences, remdesivir, started as a reject, an also-ran in the search for antiviral drugs. Its path to relevance didn’t begin until Robert Jordan plucked it from mothballs.

A Gilead scientist at the time, Jordan convinced the company seven years ago to let him assemble a library of 1,000 castoff molecules in a search for medicines to treat emerging viruses. Many viral illnesses threaten human health but don’t attract commercial interest because they lack potential for huge drug sales.

“I kept asking them, ‘Is this okay?’ ” said Jordan, who is now a vice president at a pharmaceutical start-up. “These don’t represent a commercial opportunity but a public health opportunity. Gilead gave me their blessing to do this on the side.” Continue reading.

Next Wave Of Covid-19 Deaths Will Be Rural, Poor, And White

What do you call a crisis that kills a hundred thousand Americans? It all depends on who does the dying.

At first, it seemed like it was mostly white people infected and/or killed by the coronavirus.

As the scale of the coronavirus pandemic dawned on Americans during the month of March, most of the media attention was given to white people like Tom Hanks, while the danger of coronavirus to black people went largely underreported by American media. It was around this time when both the media and the White House decreed it a national emergency. Continue reading.

Trump, who spent Memorial Day without a face mask, shares tweet criticizing Biden for wearing one

Washington Post logoHours after President Trump was spotted Monday partaking in public Memorial Day remembrances without a face mask, he hopped on Twitter to retweet a Fox News commentator criticizing former vice president Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, for wearing one.

“This might help explain why Trump doesn’t like to wear a mask in public,” Brit Hume, Fox News’s senior political analyst, tweeted Monday evening, sharing a picture of Biden at a Delaware veterans memorial earlier that day. In the photo, which documents Biden’s first public appearance since mid-March, most of the 77-year-old’s face is obscured by a black mask and a pair of aviator sunglasses.

Hume’s tweet sparked instant backlash from critics on the left. By early Tuesday, Hume was stilltrending on Twitter as detractors questioned whether he valued Biden looking “cool” more than encouraging efforts to slow the spread of the potentially deadly novel coronavirus that has now killed more than 97,000 Americans. Continue reading.

Mnuchin sees ‘strong likelihood’ of needing another COVID-19 relief bill

The Hill logoTreasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin on Thursday said there is a “strong likelihood” that another coronavirus relief bill will be needed as more states start to reopen and the economy struggles to stabilize.

“We’re going to carefully review the next few weeks,” Mnuchin said in aninterview with The Hill’s Bob Cusack during a virtual event. “I think there is a strong likelihood we will need another bill, but we just have $3 trillion we’re pumping into the economy.”

“We’re going to step back for a few weeks and think very clearly how we need to spend more money and if we need to do that,” he added. Continue reading.

DNC on Unemployment Claims

It didn’t have to be this bad. Trump’s failure to act early on severely exacerbated this crisis and significantly worsened its impact on the economy. Nearly 39 million Americans have filed for unemployment and yet Trump and Republicans have checked out of this crisis, seeing no urgency in acting to provide additional relief. This is a complete and utter failure of leadership that puts Americans’ lives and livelihoods on the line.

FAILED TO ACT: Trump’s intelligence officials warned about the threat of coronavirus in November and briefed him at the beginning of January. Trump had ample lead time before coronavirus reached the United States, but he failed to prepare or assemble a coherent response.

ABC News: “As far back as late November, U.S. intelligence officials were warning that a contagion was sweeping through China’s Wuhan region, changing the patterns of life and business and posing a threat to the population, according to four sources briefed on the secret reporting.” Continue reading “DNC on Unemployment Claims”

Why the US has the most reported coronavirus cases in the world

The Hill logoPresident Trump said Tuesday the fact that the United States has the most coronavirus cases in the world is a “badge of honor” because it shows how much testing the country is doing.

While there are many factors at play when comparing how countries have fared in the coronavirus pandemic, public health experts say Trump’s explanation left out a key factor: The U.S. has so many cases because it was initially slow to respond to the outbreak and ramp up testing and other containment tools.

Experts say the U.S. is not alone in being hit hard by the virus because of a slow response, and it’s not off-the-charts worse when comparing on a per-person basis. Rather, the U.S. is similar to Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom — countries that have also been dealt a heavy blow from the virus. Continue reading.

Trump’s hydroxychloroquine obsession is slowing the search for a coronavirus treatment

On Monday, President Trump said he’d begun taking hydroxychloroquine to stave off the novel coronavirus disease, bolstering his already robust support for the drug. Experts agree that only rigorous, placebo-controlled clinical trials will determine whether it can truly prevent infection with the virus or treat early stages of the disease it causes, COVID-19. Yet Trump’s zeal may be disrupting such trials, leaving scientists unable to answer these questions, the New York Times reports.

Although Trump has even gone so far as to praise hydroxychloroquine— used for malaria, as well as autoimmune diseases like lupus — as a “miracle,” medical experts paint a murkier picture, per The Times. Recent research has found that it didn’t help people hospitalized for COVID-19 and may elevate the risk of death. The FDA has cautioned it could cause heart problems, and Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, says whether it can help prevent infection or hospitalization remains to be seen.

At a Tuesday briefing, Trump criticized the studies on hospitalized COVID-19 patients as “a Trump enemy statement,” according to the Times. Continue reading.

Polio-era epidemiologist warns Trump’s ‘Operation Warp Speed’ could backfire horrifically

AlterNet logoPresident Donald Trump is pushing for a COVID-19 vaccine to be pushed out the door by the end of the year through an initiative called “Operation Warp Speed.”

However, a veteran epidemiologist who helped deal with the polio outbreak in the 1950s warns that rushing a vaccine for political purposes could backfire horrifically.

In a letter to the Los Angeles Times, Dr. Lauri Thrupp drew upon his experience working for the Centers for Disease Control to urge caution in producing a COVID-19 vaccine. Continue reading.