Tag: Trump unfit to lead

The Trump Administration Shut a Vaccine Safety Office Last Year. What’s the Plan Now?

New York Times logo

The office was dedicated to the long-term safety of vaccines. Experts say plans to track coronavirus vaccines are fragmented and “behind the eight ball.”

As the first coronavirus vaccines arrive in the coming year, government researchers will face a monumental challenge: monitoring the health of hundreds of millions of Americans to ensure the vaccines don’t cause harm.

Purely by chance, thousands of vaccinated people will have heart attacks, strokes and other illnesses shortly after the injections. Sorting out whether the vaccines had anything to do with their ailments will be a thorny problem, requiring a vast, coordinated effort by state and federal agencies, hospitals, drug makers and insurers to discern patterns in a flood of data. Findings will need to be clearly communicated to a distrustful public swamped with disinformation.

For now, Operation Warp Speed, created by the Trump administration to spearhead development of coronavirus vaccines and treatments, is focused on getting vaccines through clinical trials in record time and manufacturing them quickly. Continue reading.

Live updates: ‘Let’s stop this nonsense,’ Fauci says of federal coronavirus response as he comes under fire

NOTE:  This article is provided free of charge by The Washington Post.
Washington Post logoSidelined by the White House and harshly criticized in an extraordinary op-ed from a top adviser to the Trump administration, Anthony S. Fauci — the nation’s top infectious-disease expert — said in an interview with the Atlantic published Wednesday that the country needs to focus on a surging virus “rather than these games people are playing.”

“We’ve got to almost reset this and say, ‘Okay, let’s stop this nonsense,’ ” he said after being asked to state “the truth about the federal response to the pandemic” in the United States. “We’ve got to figure out, How can we get our control over this now, and, looking forward, how can we make sure that next month, we don’t have another example of California, Texas, Florida, and Arizona?”

Meanwhile, support for mask mandates continued to grow a day after another of the country’s top health officials said universal face-covering could bring covid-19 “under control” in the United States. In Alabama, Kay Ivey (R) became the latest governor to change their tune after initial resistance and issue a statewide mask order, while Walmart, the world’s largest retailer, said it would require all shoppers to wear face masks.

President Trump made 19,127 false or misleading claims in 1,226 days

Washington Post logoIt’s no longer a question as to whether President Trump will exceed 20,000 false or misleading claims by the time his current term is completed. Instead, we have to ask: Will he top 25,000?

As of May 29, his 1,226th day in office, Trump had made 19,127 false or misleading claims, according to the Fact Checker’s database that analyzes, categorizes and tracks every suspect statement he has uttered. That’s almost 16 claims a day over the course of his presidency. So far this year, he’s averaging just over 22 claims a day, similar to the pace he set in 2019.

With 235 days to go in his current term, that would leave him just short of 25,000. But we have also found that October is a dangerous month for the truth, especially if an election is nearing. In October 2018, the president tallied 1,205 claims and in October 2019, 1,159 claims. That’s a pace of 40 claims a day. Continue reading.

Don’t Let Trump Divert You With Twitter Rampage

In his latest bids to override our Constitution, would-be dictator Donald Trump issued an executive order Thursday attacking First Amendment rights on social media. Then he called for state violence against people suspected of committing property crimes.

In doing so, Trump diverted news coverage from the significant news of the day — his incompetent handling of the coronavirus pandemic and his encouragement of violence against people of color and Muslims.

So, let’s get to the real news and then his diversionary tactics: more than 103,000 confirmed American coronavirus deaths as of noon on May 29. That’s 28 percent of global deaths even though America has only about 4 percent of the planet’s nearly 7.8 billion human beings. Continue reading.

Trump is all about deregulation — except when it comes to his enemies

Washington Post logoDeregulation always, promises President Trump. Unless of course it comes to his political enemies.

Furious that Twitter deigned to fact-check him, Trump has threatened “big action” against the company, including through an executive order signed Thursday. He accused social media platforms of silencing conservatives and vowed to “strongly regulate, or close them down, before we can ever allow this to happen.”

Constitutional scholars point out that shuttering a private firm for producing speech the president dislikes would violate the First Amendment. Notably, it also contradicts a core plank of his economic agenda: reducing burdensome government interventions and regulations, wherever possible. Continue reading.

Trump calls the pandemic ‘worse than Pearl Harbor’ — and declares a cease-fire

Washington Post logoIn 1939, Albert Einstein wrote secretly to President Franklin D. Roosevelt about the potential need for “quick action” toward the development of atomic weapons.

After Roosevelt received a scientific briefing, he is said to have called in his military aide, Gen. Edwin “Pa” Watson. “Pa! This requires action!” FDR said.

Thus began what would become the Manhattan Project, a sprawling collaboration among the military, academics and corporations, ultimately employing 130,000 and spending the then-extraordinary sum of $2.2 billion in successfully building the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Oak Ridge, Tenn., worked on uranium; Chicago worked on plutonium; Hanford, Wash., built reactors; Los Alamos, N.M., designed bombs; and Alamogordo, N.M., held testing. Continue reading.