From March Archives: A Must Read, How Trump Betrayed Our Health by Holding Up CV Virus Tests: Coronavirus May Chase Trump From the White House Because It's Impervious to His Lies
March 13, 2020
Trump is guilty of negligent homicide. (MANYBITS)
MARK KARLIN, EDITOR OF BUZZFLASH
It’s hard to find the words to describe how America arrived at the tragic, farcical and mendacious Trump “speech to the nation” (written by Jay Kushner and Stephen Miller) on Wednesday night. It was a watershed moment in which Dan Froomkin of Press Watch believes the DC press corps may finally stop showing deference to a deranged, lethal adolescent acting as, in Nancy Pelosi’s words, an impostor President. It seemed to be a moment when Trump may have crossed the threshold to becoming irrelevant, but nonetheless a threat to our public health, instead of a celebrity spectacle that receives serious coverage from the DC press corps.
Of course, one has to qualify such an assertion. We’ve been here before, and it doesn’t take long for the press corps to start treating Trump as a normal president again.
BuzzFlash has written in numerous commentaries that the Trump administration was likely intentionally holding back on distributing Coronavirus test to artificially suppress the numbers of infections, as he frankly revealed in his slovenly lie-filled CDC news conference, when he said he was opposed to letting the passengers and crew of the infected Grand Princess disembark near San Francisco, because it would raise the numbers of infected individuals once they stepped on US soil. That he was so frank is representative of how he normalizes his derangement by announcing execrable actions to the political press corps.
Thom Hartmann, in a short commentary posted on BuzzFlash Thursday (along with a BuzzFlash afterword) posited that Trump had also granted the development of vaccine rights to for-profit Big Pharma companies. Many of the CEOs are Trump friends and contributors, including HHS Director Alex Azar, who was top lobbyist for Ely Lilly & Company. Apparently, in general, the only Coronavirus test kits available now are from private labs and some university and specialty hospitals. Even in these few sites, persons are refused a test if they don’t meet certain criteria, but the vast majority of Americans have no COVID-19 testing recourse whatsoever.
Mike Pence is ostensible point man for the devious and potentially catastrophic Trump anti-Covid-19 “plan.” But there is no plan. Governors, mayors and local officials have taken over the efforts to contain the virus because the Trump administration appears either clueless or intentionally bungling. Outside of DC, Trump is being left in the dust, but federal assistance is still lacking and in vital need.
America is shutting down around Trump, as he continues peddling his self-serving and cruel alternative reality.
As BuzzFlash asked in the afterword to the Hartmann observations yesterday:
BuzzFlash doesn’t know if these for-profit labs are covered by government insurance. but the one million government tests that have been promised by Mike Pence for some time, it appears, have yet to show up.
If one were a cynic, one could argue that someone or persons is willfully holding these Coronavirus tests up. One must also mention that is likely that the US could still accept the World Health Organization test that Trumped turned down, as Hartmann notes, and end the rampant infection that is assuredly exponentially growing because infected people are walking around untested due to Trump's utter betrayal on testing. In addition, there is the issue of the additional kit needed to confirm the tests and its shortage. As Politico detailed in a November 10 article: “US coronavirus testing threatened by shortage of critical lab materials.”
The disaster of the missing and falsely promised government CV testing kits, given that it is resulting in perhaps boosting the Coronavirus toll out of manageable control because of untested transmission that may paralyze our hospital system when the testing kicks in, should be the lead story in every news medium.
Trump does not care if people suffer and die. He wants low infection numbers to try and reassure the markets, which he is truly a failure at achieving. On Thursday, the Dow closed down 2,300 points into clear correction territory and possibly heralding a recession.
Indeed, the self-aggrandizing goals of Trump’s speech and Coronavirus efforts to use the crisis to help him win in 2020 have all failed, and that may signal the press turning on him, because he can only survive as president if the press props him up, and not just the right-wing Fox contingent.
1) The markets have suffered their worst week since 1987, not a good sign for a Trump re-election campaign. Furthermore, his disastrous and divisive speech was filled with so many incorrect statements, his staff had to correct them after he was finished. Then the markets plunged the following morning, given the lack of credibility and bold ideas conveyed in the speech.
2) He has been clearly holding up the distribution of the government test kits to keep down the number of CDC announced infections. However, not many people in the media, and certainly in the medical field are buying it. Thursday, the director of the Ohio department of public health speculated that “more than 100,000 people in the state are already carrying the Coronavirus: 1% of the state’s population,” in an interview with radio station WKYC in Ohio. Admittedly, this may be an overestimate, but even if it were 50% accurate it would overwhelm the Ohio healthcare system. (All Ohio schools have been closed for at least three weeks by order of the governor.)
Trump’s reliance on artificially suppressed figures are not believed by many credible experts or reporters.
3) Pressure is mounting for Pence to finally fork over the million government test kits, with more “promised” down the road. And when that happens, and it will, because Trump cannot hold out much longer, the number of infected people will skyrocket because Trump, in not distributing the kits, is, as noted above, leaving untold numbers of infected people infecting others as they move about.
At that point, it is possible the US will be in a catastrophic healthcare crisis. That is because the goal of early detection is to isolate the infected and limit infections to a strategy called “flattening the curve.” This means the infections are kept to a stable rate so as not overwhelm hospitals and needed medical supplies for the seriously infected, such as ventilators.
An illustration of the horrific storm Trump is willfully heading us into can best be illustrated by the chart below:
Trump’s diabolical plan is heading the US into the red zone, at which time the US health system cannot meet the capacity need of all the Coronavirus infections.
Italy is in the red zone now, and anecdotal stories from the completely quarantined nation are heartbreaking. Doctors report that in some sections of the country they don’t have enough life-saving equipment, and they must choose whom to save and whom to let die.
Furthermore, the surge of demand for treating Coronavirus patients that is coming may force other seriously people from being hospitalized due to capacity issues.
This is the treacherous legacy that may be left in the wake of Trump’s indifference to human life. His soul is hollowed out.
5) Governors, Mayors, Corporations, Universities, National Sports Leagues, Small Businesses, Organizations, Orchestras, Theaters, and so many more are rejecting Trump’s duplicitous downplaying of the COVID-19 virus. He is becoming irrelevant as a “Dear Leader” as Americans take charge of what they can, because they can’t trust Trump (now with more than 16,000 lies in less than four years).
If you have doubts about how Trump could be so indifferent to life as to knowingly exacerbate a pandemic in the US, read Newsweek reporter Seth Abramson’s March 12 tweet below.
As Foreign Policy headlines an article yesterday, “Trump Can’t Deport the Coronavirus.” However, he might declare an emergency and martial law, and potentially cancel the 2020 elections. That may have been his insidious goal all along.
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