Tag: Trump putting re-election over American lives
Oklahoma reporter who attended Trump’s Tulsa rally tests positive for coronavirus
A journalist who covered President Trump’s rally in Tulsa, Okla., last week announced Friday he has tested positive for the coronavirus.
Paul Monies, a reporter for Oklahoma Watch, said he got his positive diagnosis Friday, though he is not experiencing symptoms.
“Friends, I tested positive for #COVID19. I’m pretty surprised. I have zero symptoms (so far) and I feel fine. In fact, I ran 5 miles this morning. I spent the last few hours calling people I know I’ve been in contact with in the last 14 days. Be safe out there,” he wrote on Twitter. Continue reading.
Reporter Flames Pence For Trump Campaign’s COVID-19 Safety Hypocrisy
“How can you say the campaign is not part of the problem?” asked a CBS News journalist who pointed out few masks and no social distancing at Trump rallies.
A reporter Friday challenged Vice President Mike Pence on the hypocrisy of Donald Trump’s re-election campaign ignoring COVID-19 safety precautions that have been recommended to the public by the White House’s own health experts.
Paula Reid of CBS News asked Pence at the White House coronavirus press conference how the Trump campaign is not “part of the problem” when no one wears masks or practices safe social distancing to help curb the spread of COVID-19 — nor apparently cares if its supporters follow suit.
“It really sounds as if you’re saying, ‘Do as we say, not as we do,’” Reid said. “You’re telling people to listen to local officials, but in Tulsa, you defied local officials to have an event” that resulted in “dozens of Secret Service agents, dozens of campaign staffers now quarantined because of positive results.” Continue reading.
Pence tries to assure GOP senators as coronavirus cases spike
The vice president’s appearance on Capitol Hill comes as many states scramble to contain a surge in infections, while Washington sits back.
Vice President Pence urged GOP senators on Wednesday to focus on “encouraging signs” despite a recent spike in coronavirus cases in numerous states as various localities move swiftly to reopen their economies, according to several people present.
Pence made the remarks in a closed-door lunch with Republican senators on Capitol Hill as lawmakers have begun to express alarm because of rising infection rates in Florida, Arizona, Texas and several other states, some of which are likely to be critical to the outcome of the presidential race in the fall and control of the Senate. On Wednesday, five states hit new highs in coronavirus hospitalizations.
Multiple senators said Pence pointed to positive indicators, including the fact that while infections are rising, the mortality rate is not. That is partly because there is more testing, and younger and healthier people now account for larger shares of those getting tested, Pence said. Continue reading.
Trump pushing officials to speed up already-ambitious coronavirus vaccine timeline
Scientists fear regulators could come under pressure to approve a vaccine before it is fully vetted for safety and effectiveness
President Trump, faced with multiple crises and falling poll numbers less than five months before the presidential election, is prodding top health officials to move faster on a historically ambitious timeline to approve a coronavirus vaccine by year’s end.
The goal is to instill confidence among voters that the virus can be tamed and the economy fully reopened under Trump’s stewardship.
In a meeting last month with Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar — who is overseeing the effort called Operation Warp Speed, along with Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper — Trump pushed Azar repeatedly to speed up the already unprecedented timeline, according to two senior White House officials familiar with the meeting who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations. Trump wants some people to be able to get the vaccine sooner than the end of the year to demonstrate an end to the pandemic is within reach, according to those officials and two others. Continue reading.
White House pressure for a vaccine raises risk the U.S. will approve one that doesn’t work
Drugmakers and health agencies have already begun rewriting the rules of vaccine research.
President Donald Trump has promised that there will be a coronavirus vaccine before the year is out. But public health experts are growing increasingly worried that the White House will pressure regulators to approve the first vaccine candidate to show promise — without proof that it provides effective, reliable protection against the virus.
Drugmakers and health agencies have already begun rewriting the rules of vaccine research, launching candidates into clinical trials at record speed in search of a pandemic-ending shot. Data on the vaccines’ safety is already trickling in. But no candidate is yet ready for the final step of the development process: a months-long trial in tens of thousands of volunteers to prove once and for all whether the shot works.
That tight timing, coupled with the high-pressure political environment, has experts concerned that the Food and Drug Administration could grant emergency-use authorization to one or more vaccines before clinical trials have definitively determined whether they can prevent infection. Taking that step also could make millions of doses available outside of clinical trials, making it hard to enroll enough people in the trials to get the data ultimately needed to show the vaccine works. It could also squeeze other — potentially better — candidates out of the market. Continue reading.
Trump seizes on new rallying cry to reopen the country, but Democrats see caution as an advantage
President Trump has been delivering his latest rallying cry in all-caps, a self-described “wartime president” defiantly thumbing his nose at the cautions of governors and scientists wary of a viral resurgence if the country returns too quickly to normal.
“REOPEN THE COUNTRY!” he tweeted this week. “TRANSITION TO GREATNESS.”
The exhortations follow a political strategy his advisers hope can help frame the coming election season: A president who had hoped to run on his economic record as a job creator might still be able to reclaim the brand despite the historic economic collapse by painting Democrats as opponents of an economic resurrection. Continue reading.
Paul Krugman offers an elegy for the ‘thousands about to die for the Dow’
It’s not entirely clear what is motivating Republican politicians across the country to agitate for the premature reopening of businesses, boldly ignoring the all-but-certain increase in human deaths from the COVID-19 virus that will doubtlessly follow. But Nobel laureate Paul Krugman, writing for the The New York Times, tries to distill it into three possible rationales.
The first is that Republicans, sensing an electoral disaster looming for their party in November, are desperately offering up American citizens as human sacrifices in a ritualistic obeisance to their Dow Jones deity, in hopes that Americans flooding back into an infected and potentially deadly work environment will magically “turn around” the economy.
One answer is that thousands of Americans may be about to die for the Dow. We know that Trump is obsessed with the stock market, and his long refusal to take Covid-19 seriously reportedly had a lot to do with his belief that doing otherwise would hurt stock prices. He may now believe that pretending that the crisis is over will boost stocks, and that that’s all that matters.
Trump touts accelerated push on coronavirus vaccines
President Trump on Friday unveiled the team leading a federal effort that he hopes will produce a coronavirus vaccine by the end of the year, an accelerated timeline that has been met with skepticism from health experts.
“When I say quickly, we’re looking to get it by the end of the year if we can, maybe before,” Trump said in remarks from the White House Rose Garden, officially laying out the objectives of “Operation Warp Speed,” a public-private partnership to accelerate the development of a vaccine for the novel coronavirus.
Trump described the project as “a massive scientific industrial and logistical endeavor unlike anything our country has seen since the Manhattan Project.” He said the project would begin to manufacture vaccines as they go through trials so that a proven vaccine would be ready to distribute once trials are completed. Continue reading.
A noose, an ax and Trump-inspired insults: Anti-lockdown protesters ratchet up violent rhetoric
Rain drizzled as a crowd of about 200 people gathered in front of the Michigan State Capitol in Lansing on Thursday to urge Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) to lift coronavirus restrictions. The protesters — some carrying guns, few wearing masks — held up signs that said, “Stop Whitmer now,” and, “Dangerous safety is better than safe tyranny.”
Near the capitol steps, one man had strung an American flag onto a fishing rod. Below the flag, a brunette doll dangled from a noose tied to the pole. When another protester reached to grab the doll, a fight broke out. A video captured people wrestling over the flag and doll, shoving one another and shouting. Nearby, two people struggled over an ax.
“Where is capitol police right now?” a woman can be heard shouting into a microphone in a video published by MLive. “We have an issue, can we have the police come up to the steps please? Where are the cops?” Continue reading.