He Could Have Seen What Was Coming: Behind Trump’s Failure on the Virus

[90DayFinancier 910]

An examination reveals the president was warned about the potential for a pandemic but that internal divisions, lack of planning and his faith in his own instincts led to a halting response.

 

WASHINGTON — “Any way you cut it, this is going to be bad,” a senior medical adviser at the Department of Veterans Affairs, Dr. Carter Mecher, wrote on the night of Jan. 28, in an email to a group of public health experts scattered around the government and universities. “The projected size of the outbreak already seems hard to believe.”

A week after the first coronavirus case had been identified in the United States, and six long weeks before President Trump finally took aggressive action to confront the danger the nation was facing — a pandemic that is now forecast to take tens of thousands of American lives — Dr. Mecher was urging the upper ranks of the nation’s public health bureaucracy to wake up and prepare for the possibility of far more drastic action.

“You guys made fun of me screaming to close the schools,” he wrote to the group, which called itself “Red Dawn,” an inside joke based on the 1984 movie about a band of Americans trying to save the country after a foreign invasion. “Now I’m screaming, close the colleges and universities.”

His was hardly a lone voice. Throughout January, as Mr. Trump repeatedly played down the seriousness of the virus and focused on other issues, an array of figures inside his government — from top White House advisers to experts deep in the cabinet departments and intelligence agencies — identified the threat, sounded alarms and made clear the need for aggressive action.

 

He Could Have Seen What Was Coming: Behind Trump’s Failure on the Virus https://nyti.ms/3ceNp5H

[TBoneTX 45,273]

And what good does placing blame do?

What would Joe Biden or Felonia Milhous von Pantsuit have done that would be any more effective?

Why isn't the public blaming our allegedly negligent, murderous President?

[Voice of Reason 10,298]

Just imagine how many folks could have been more focused on covid were it not for the fake impeachment...
Just imagine how this might have turned out had Trump not been called out as xenophobic for wanting to shut down all travel from China.

It wasn't labeled a pandemic until 11 March. Why not?
 

Why was Pelosi more focused on having special pens made than she was on protecting her state from the virus?

Why, why, why are you still trying to pin blame?  At this point, what does it really matter?

 

[Dashinka 24,492]

If there is any blame to be placed, it should be pinned squarely onto the WHO.  They were telling everyone in January that human to human transmission was not happening, and claiming China had everything under control instead of sounding the alarm bells.

[millefleur 5,046]

4 hours ago, Dashinka said:

If there is any blame to be placed, it should be pinned squarely onto the WHO.  They were telling everyone in January that human to human transmission was not happening, and claiming China had everything under control instead of sounding the alarm bells.

Totally agree. I've read the WHO is very compromised by the soft power of the Chinese government, including to the point where they have "endorsed" trad Chinese medicine, which is a huge driving force of the wild animal black market, in addition to being flat out being pseudoscientific and possibly dangerous to human health.

 

https://www.msn.com/en-in/news/world/whos-endorsement-of-traditional-chinese-medicine-draws-flak/ar-BB12oHGd

Edited April 12, 2020 by millefleur

[Orangesapples 1,954]

4 hours ago, Dashinka said:

If there is any blame to be placed, it should be pinned squarely onto the WHO.  They were telling everyone in January that human to human transmission was not happening, and claiming China had everything under control instead of sounding the alarm bells.

What about... Placing the blame in more than one person/organization? 

[Orangesapples 1,954]

10 hours ago, TBoneTX said:

And what good does placing blame do?

What would Joe Biden or Felonia Milhous von Pantsuit have done that would be any more effective?

Why isn't the public blaming our allegedly negligent, murderous President?

The job of the media is to hold those in power accountable and to point out their flaws. 

[Dashinka 24,492]

4 minutes ago, Orangesapples said:

What about... Placing the blame in more than one person/organization? 

Ok, there are 50 governors that have way more power than President Trump related to public health emergencies.  I suppose we can spread around the blame.

[Orangesapples 1,954]

4 minutes ago, Dashinka said:

Ok, there are 50 governors that have way more power than President Trump related to public health emergencies.  I suppose we can spread around the blame.

Yes, that's correct 

[Steeleballz 7,550]

11 minutes ago, Dashinka said:

Ok, there are 50 governors that have way more power than President Trump related to public health emergencies.  I suppose we can spread around the blame.

 

 

  What about people like Rush, telling the 42 million faithful that Covid-19 was just the common cold. Do people like that share any of the responsibility?

[Dashinka 24,492]

18 minutes ago, Steeleballz said:

 

 

  What about people like Rush, telling the 42 million faithful that Covid-19 was just the common cold. Do people like that share any of the responsibility?

If we are going to start playing the blame game, there are a lot of folks out there deserving some.  As I mentioned, the WHO is at the top of my list, they should have been sounding the alarm bells much sooner then they did.  As to Limbaugh, I remember him pointing out that there are caronaviruses that due indeed cause the common cold.  Would you dispute that?

 

This thread is about a hit piece from a biased media source that wants to put all the blame on President Trump.  The same media source that at times was deriding President Trump for being a dictator, now complaining that he did not act like a dictator.  I do agree that Trump should have restricted travel from the EU much sooner than he did considering that he EU was not doing anything.  

[cyclone27 710]

China and WHO are who any sensible person should be focusing their anger towards.  

[Steeleballz 7,550]

2 minutes ago, Dashinka said:

If we are going to start playing the blame game, there are a lot of folks out there deserving some.  As I mentioned, the WHO is at the top of my list, they should have been sounding the alarm bells much sooner then they did.  As to Limbaugh, I remember him pointing out that there are caronaviruses that due indeed cause the common cold.  Would you dispute that?

 

This thread is about a hit piece from a biased media source that wants to put all the blame on President Trump.  The same media source that at times was deriding President Trump for being a dictator, now complaining that he did not act like a dictator.  I do agree that Trump should have restricted travel from the EU much sooner than he did considering that he EU was not doing anything.  

 

   Obviously I don't dispute that there are Coronaviruses that cause the common cold. However it was a big mistake to assert that this particular virus, SARS-COV2, is just like the ones that cause common cold. AS we know, it's more like the one that caused SARS, hence the nomenclature.

 

   There are species of influenza virus that don't cause human illness either. I would hope if/when avian flu breaks out, we don't have people saying not to worry, it's just another non-human influenza virus.

[millefleur 5,046]

2 minutes ago, cyclone27 said:

China and WHO are who any sensible person should be focusing their anger towards.  

We could also say that it was very precarious of us to move all our medical supply production to China as well, without having a backup plan in case supply chains got broken down during a pandemic. Hindsight is 20/20. It seems really nobody here truly prepared for a pandemic, which is rather baffling. You would assume hospitals have risk management people on staff for all the money their admin gets paid?

[Steeleballz 7,550]

47 minutes ago, millefleur said:

We could also say that it was very precarious of us to move all our medical supply production to China as well, without having a backup plan in case supply chains got broken down during a pandemic. Hindsight is 20/20. It seems really nobody here truly prepared for a pandemic, which is rather baffling. You would assume hospitals have risk management people on staff for all the money their admin gets paid?

 

  We have them, but from what I can tell, they spend most of the time looking at ways we might get sued and trying to prevent that.