Skip navigation

Category Archives: Trumpedation

Two White House Coronavirus Cases Raise Question of if Anyone Is Really Safe


Does anyone really expect honesty out this administration about anything? Within this article TOTUS deflects and lies. MA

Peter Baker and Michael Crowley

7 hrs ago

WASHINGTON — In his eagerness to reopen the country, President Trump faces the challenge of convincing Americans that it would be safe to go back to the workplace. But the past few days have demonstrated that even his own workplace may not be safe from the coronavirus.© Anna Moneymaker/The New York Times Reporters listening to Larry Kudlow speak on Friday outside the White House.

Vice President Mike Pence’s press secretary tested positive for the virus on Friday, forcing a delay in the departure of Air Force Two while a half-dozen other members of his staff were taken off the plane for further testing. That came only a day after word that one of the president’s own military valets had been infected.

All of which raised an obvious question: If it is so hard to maintain a healthy environment at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, the most famous office address in the world, where staff members are tested regularly, some as often as every day, then how can businesses across the country without anywhere near as much access to the same resources establish a safe space for their workers?

© Anna Moneymaker/The New York Times President Trump participating in a wreath-laying ceremony on Friday at the World War II Memorial.

“The virus is in the White House, any way you look at it,” said Juliette Kayyem, a former assistant secretary of homeland security under President Barack Obama. “Whether it’s contained or not, we will know soon enough. But the fact that a place — secured, with access to the best means to mitigate harm — is not able to stop the virus has the potential of undermining confidence in any capacity to defeat it.”

The presence of the virus in both the West Wing and the residential floors of the White House brings home the dilemma facing the nation at a pivotal point in the pandemic. With more than 77,000 deaths in the United States so far and cases rising by the day, states and employers are wrestling with when and how to reopen without putting workers, customers and clients at risk.

But the federal government has not detailed the best way to minimize risk, much less avoid more deaths. Even as it has experienced positive tests of its own, the White House has so far blocked the release of a set of recommendations developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, deeming them overly prescriptive. As a result, businesses have been left to make their best guesses with lives on the line.

Both Mr. Trump and Mr. Pence are now tested daily, and both tested negative after the latest infections were discovered. Staff members in proximity to them are also tested daily, as are guests. Congressional Republicans who visited Mr. Trump on Friday were spaced out around the table.

Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, told reporters that “we’ve put in some additional protocols over the last 48 hours” to reduce the risk and expressed confidence that the president could be protected. “This is probably the safest place that you can come to,” he said.

But neither Mr. Trump nor Mr. Pence regularly wears a mask, nor do most of their aides. The president hosted a wreath-laying ceremony at the World War II Memorial in Washington on Friday to mark the 75th anniversary of the victory over Nazi Germany by inviting several veterans aged 95 and over, even though they were in the most vulnerable age group.

The latest positive test further rattled a White House already on edge after the president’s military valet came down with the virus. Katie Miller, the vice president’s press secretary and a top spokeswoman for the White House coronavirus efforts, had tested negative on Thursday but then tested positive on Friday morning.

The result forced Mr. Pence’s scheduled flight to Des Moines to be delayed for more than an hour, even though she was not traveling with him, so that six other aides who had been in contact with her could be escorted from the plane at Joint Base Andrews before its departure. All six later tested negative but were sent home out of caution, officials said. Ms. Miller is married to Stephen Miller, the president’s senior adviser, and he too was tested again on Friday and the results came back negative.

White House officials initially asked reporters not to identify Ms. Miller as the aide who tested positive, but Mr. Trump blew the secret when he identified her publicly during his meeting with the congressional Republicans as “Katie” and “the press person” for Mr. Pence.

“She tested very good for a long period of time. And then all of a sudden today, she tested positive,” Mr. Trump said. “She hasn’t come into contact with me. She spends some time with the vice president.”

But Ms. Miller has been in the vicinity of the president in recent days, including during his Fox News appearance on Sunday at the Lincoln Memorial and again on Thursday in the Rose Garden. Her husband is in meetings with the president even more frequently as the architect of his crackdown on immigration, although he and other aides have sat farther away than they have in the past.

Multiple presidential aides are now tested daily, as are about 10 members of Mr. Pence’s staff, an official said. But tests are conducted less frequently on other White House officials who work next door in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building and have regular contact with West Wing aides even if not the president himself.

The Secret Service has 11 active cases of the coronavirus and 23 employees who have recovered, current and former government officials said Friday, but it was unclear whether any were agents or served in the White House. The service, which has 150 offices across the country responsible for protecting a variety of dignitaries and investigating financial crimes, also has 60 others undergoing self-quarantine, Yahoo News reported. While tested regularly, agents in the president’s detail have not been wearing masks, and new faces have shown up in recent days.

The White House infections further inflamed the national debate about testing even as many states begin lifting restrictions on businesses and social gatherings. Mr. Trump has said testing is adequate for reopening even as public health experts said it must be much more robust to have a better map of the outbreak. The Harvard Global Health Institute estimated this week that the United States needs to do at least 900,000 tests a day by May 15, but is only doing about 250,000 now.

“One of the most important ways to protect our workers is by conducting more tests,” said Lorraine M. Martin, the president of the National Safety Council, a nonprofit advocacy group. “Increased access to Covid-19 testing for our work force will help flatten the curve by removing people with coronavirus from the workplace and better ensure the safety and health of employees who are maintaining operations during this pandemic.”

But on Friday, Mr. Trump cast doubt on testing as a panacea, saying Ms. Miller’s case at the White House demonstrated the limits of its utility.

“This is why the whole concept of tests aren’t necessarily great,” the president said. “The tests are perfect, but something can happen between a test where it’s good and then something happens and all of a sudden” it is not.

Some experts said he has a point. “People need to understand the limitations of testing,” said Nellie Brown, the director of workplace health and safety programs at the Worker Institute at Cornell University, who is advising businesses on how to reopen safely. “When you take a test you’re basically getting a slice in time. You know what is happening at that moment, but you don’t know what may happen even soon after that.”

Even so, she said, the president should be setting an example for the rest of the country, like by wearing a mask. “You need to model the behavior you want others to exhibit because you’re so powerful an example,” she said. “It’s so important for others to see we’re all doing this because we’re all in this together.”

No one in the White House seems to expect Mr. Trump to wear a mask anytime soon. His aides said it was not necessary because a mask is worn to protect others in case its wearer is infected, and the president is tested regularly. But privately they acknowledge that he has expressed concern that it would make him look bad.

Kayleigh McEnany, the White House press secretary, disputed the idea that the new cases in the White House reflected continuing risk to Americans who are being asked to return to work, with less testing and monitoring than the White House receives.

“The guidelines that our experts have put forward to keep this building safe — which means contact tracing, all of the recommended guidelines we have for businesses that have essential workers — we’re now putting in place here in the White House,” she said at a briefing.

Asked about the veterans in their 90s who joined Mr. Trump for the World War II anniversary, she said the men “made the choice to come here because they’ve chosen to put their nation first.” Asked why the president, who briefly addressed them from a distance of several feet, had not worn a mask, Ms. McEnany said, “This president will make the decision as to whether to wear a mask or not.”

Calling into “Fox & Friends” earlier in the day, Mr. Trump provided additional details about the White House valet who tested positive for the coronavirus. He said that the aide, who is in the Navy, had not worked for several days before Tuesday, when he was “in the room” with the president for an unspecified amount of time before discovering that he was carrying the virus. “I don’t think any contact,” Mr. Trump added of his interactions with the aide.

After some prompting, the president cheekily offered to send a test kit from the White House to his likely Democratic opponent in the general election, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. That, he said, would allow Mr. Biden to “get out of the basement so he can speak,” adding that “every time he talks, it’s, like, a good thing.”

Maggie Haberman contributed reporting from New York, and Michael D. Shear and Zolan Kanno-Youngs from Washington.

btn_donateCC_LG

Please Donate

 

Andrew Cuomo gets it right: Govern by science, not your gut


Jennifer Rubin
Editor’s note: The opinions in this article are the author’s, as published by our content partner, and do not necessarily represent the views of MSN or Microsoft.

a man standing next to a train: New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo (D) tries out a spraying device that is part of a three-step disinfecting process for a New York City subway car in Queens on Saturday.© Kevin P. Coughlin/AP New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo (D) tries out a spraying device that is part of a three-step disinfecting process for a New York City subway car in Queens on Saturday.How many times have we heard President Trump say he just has a “feeling” or that his “gut feeling” is superior to expert, evidenced-based data? A lot. That “feeling” — whether it’s about North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s intentions or the economy or the 2018 midterms — has often been wrong. During the coronavirus epidemic, however, his preference for emotion and feelings can cost lives.

It does not have to be that way. New York’s Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo (D) did not mention Trump by name at his news conference on Monday. He did, however, implicitly set up a contrast between Trump (and his minions) and himself when it comes to gradually reopening the economy, schools and public places. Cuomo insisted you have to act with “the best information you have, learning from the lessons you have … which means, don’t act emotionally.” He continued on: “Don’t act because ‘I feel this, I feel that.’ … Forget the anecdotal, forget the atmospheric, forget the environmental, forget the emotional. Look at the data. Look at the measurements. Look at the science. Follow the facts.”

That is as good a model of government decision-making as you will hear, and a complete repudiation of the unscientific (or anti-scientific), impulsive style of political theater now in vogue with many Republicans. “Feelings,” in their mind, take the place of facts. Are facts missing to show the virus was created in a laboratory? Well, he’s got a feeling. No facts to suggest this is all going to “disappear”? Trump has a feeling. Indeed, almost without fail, when he says he has a feeling about something, you can bet there is no evidence for it or that the evidence points in the opposite direction.

Thousands of lives hang in the balance depending upon how elected leaders make their decisions. Trump operates without data (Liberate Michigan!). New York, Cuomo explained, does the opposite: “The rate of transmission goes up, stop the reopening, close the valve, close the valve right away. So, reopen businesses, do it in phases and watch that rate of transmission. It gets over 1.1, stop everything immediately.” Methodical, fact-driven and emotion-free decision-making is called for when the problem — a virus — is a natural phenomenon incapable of being spun, bullied or ignored.

It is not good enough to say, “We have enough tests for everyone!” First, it is not true. Second, it gives no guidance to states as to how they can responsibly reopen. Cuomo explained, “You have to be prepared to do 30 tests for every 1,000 residents. New York is doing more tests than any country in the state by far.” While as a state New York is doing more than any state per capita, “it doesn’t matter what we’re doing statewide. To open a region, that region has to have a testing capacity of 30 per 1,000.” Likewise, on contact tracing, there must be 30 contact tracers for every 100,000 residents before a region can reopen.

If we are going to reopen the business and return to something approaching normal, we have to be prepared to put facts first. Measure the data. Act on the data. Readjust on the data. Such a rational approach to governance is entirely beyond Trump’s capabilities, which is one reason he is uniquely unfit to govern during a health emergency.

btn_donateCC_LG

Please Donate

She Predicted the Coronavirus. What Does She Foresee Next?


 

Frank Bruni

The New York Times•May 4, 2020

Laurie Garrett, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, cheers essential workers from the roof of her apartment building, joining a citywide ritual every evening in New York, on April 28, 2020. (Joshua Bright/The New York Times)

I told Laurie Garrett that she might as well change her name to Cassandra. Everyone is calling her that anyway.

She and I were Zooming — that’s a verb now, right? — and she pulled out a 2017 book, “Warnings: Finding Cassandras to Stop Catastrophes.” It notes that Garrett, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, was prescient not only about the impact of HIV but also about the emergence and global spread of more contagious pathogens.

“I’m a double Cassandra,” Garrett said.

She’s also prominently mentioned in a recent Vanity Fair article by David Ewing Duncan about “the Coronavirus Cassandras.”

Cassandra, of course, was the Greek prophetess doomed to issue unheeded warnings. What Garrett has been warning most direly about — in her 1994 bestseller, “The Coming Plague,” and in subsequent books and speeches, including TED Talks — is a pandemic like the current one.

She saw it coming. So a big part of what I wanted to ask her about was what she sees coming next. Steady yourself. Her crystal ball is dark.

Despite the stock market’s swoon for it, remdesivir probably isn’t our ticket out, she told me. “It’s not curative,” she said, pointing out that the strongest claims so far are that it merely shortens the recovery of COVID-19 patients. “We need either a cure or a vaccine.”

But she can’t envision that vaccine anytime in the next year, while COVID-19 will remain a crisis much longer than that.

“I’ve been telling everybody that my event horizon is about 36 months, and that’s my best-case scenario,” she said.

“I’m quite certain that this is going to go in waves,” she added. “It won’t be a tsunami that comes across America all at once and then retreats all at once. It will be micro-waves that shoot up in Des Moines and then in New Orleans and then in Houston and so on, and it’s going to affect how people think about all kinds of things.”

They’ll reevaluate the importance of travel. They’ll reassess their use of mass transit. They’ll revisit the need for face-to-face business meetings. They’ll reappraise having their kids go to college out of state.

So, I asked, is “back to normal,” a phrase that so many people cling to, a fantasy?

“This is history right in front of us,” Garrett said. “Did we go ‘back to normal’ after 9/11? No. We created a whole new normal. We securitized the United States. We turned into an anti-terror state. And it affected everything. We couldn’t go into a building without showing ID and walking through a metal detector, and couldn’t get on airplanes the same way ever again. That’s what’s going to happen with this.”

Not the metal detectors, but a seismic shift in what we expect, in what we endure, in how we adapt.

Maybe in political engagement, too, Garrett said.

If America enters the next wave of coronavirus infections “with the wealthy having gotten somehow wealthier off this pandemic by hedging, by shorting, by doing all the nasty things that they do, and we come out of our rabbit holes and realize, ‘Oh, my God, it’s not just that everyone I love is unemployed or underemployed and can’t make their maintenance or their mortgage payments or their rent payments, but now all of a sudden those jerks that were flying around in private helicopters are now flying on private personal jets, and they own an island that they go to, and they don’t care whether or not our streets are safe,’ then I think we could have massive political disruption.

“Just as we come out of our holes and see what 25% unemployment looks like,” she said, “we may also see what collective rage looks like.”

Garrett has been on my radar since the early 1990s, when she worked for Newsday and did some of the best reporting anywhere on AIDS. Her Pulitzer, in 1996, was for coverage of Ebola in Zaire. She has been a fellow at Harvard’s School of Public Health, was a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and consulted on the 2011 movie “Contagion.”

Her expertise, in other words, has long been in demand. But not like now.

Each morning when she opens her email, “there’s the Argentina request, Hong Kong request, Taiwan request, South Africa request, Morocco, Turkey,” she told me. “Not to mention all of the American requests.” It made me feel bad about taking more than an hour of her time on April 27. But not so bad that I didn’t cadge another 30 minutes on April 30.

She said she wasn’t surprised that a coronavirus wrought this devastation, that China minimized what was going on or that the response in many places was sloppy and sluggish. She’s Cassandra, after all.

But there is one part of the story she couldn’t have predicted: that the paragon of sloppiness and sluggishness would be the United States.

“I never imagined that,” she said. “Ever.”

The highlights — or, rather, lowlights — include President Donald Trump’s initial acceptance of the assurances by President Xi Jinping of China that all would be well; his scandalous complacency from late January through early March; his cheerleading for unproven treatments; his musings about cockamamie ones; his abdication of muscular federal guidance for the states; and his failure, even now, to sketch out a detailed, long-range strategy for containing the coronavirus.

Having long followed Garrett’s work, I can attest that it’s not driven by partisanship. She praised George W. Bush for fighting HIV in Africa.

But she called Trump “the most incompetent, foolhardy buffoon imaginable.”

And she’s shocked that America isn’t in a position to lead the global response to this crisis, in part because science and scientists have been so degraded under Trump.

Referring to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta and its analogues abroad, she told me, “I’ve heard from every CDC in the world — the European CDC, the African CDC, China CDC — and they say, ‘Normally, our first call is to Atlanta, but we ain’t hearing back.’ There’s nothing going on down there. They’ve gutted that place. They’ve gagged that place. I can’t get calls returned anymore. Nobody down there is feeling like it’s safe to talk. Have you even seen anything important and vital coming out of the CDC?”

The problem, Garrett added, is bigger than Trump and older than his presidency. America has never been sufficiently invested in public health. The riches and renown go mostly to physicians who find new and better ways to treat heart disease, cancer and the like. The big political conversation is about individuals’ access to health care.

But what about the work to keep our air and water safe for everyone; to design policies and systems for quickly detecting outbreaks, containing them and protecting entire populations? Where are the rewards for the architects of that?

Garrett recounted her time at Harvard. “The medical school is all marble, with these grand columns,” she said. “The school of public health is this funky building, the ugliest possible architecture, with the ceilings falling in.”

“That’s America?” I asked.

“That’s America,” she said.

And what America needs most right now, she said, isn’t this drumbeat of testing, testing, testing, because there will never be enough superfast, superreliable tests to determine on the spot who can safely enter a crowded workplace or venue, which is the scenario that some people seem to have in mind. America needs good information, from many rigorously designed studies, about the prevalence and deadliness of coronavirus infections in given subsets of people so that governors and mayors can develop rules for social distancing and reopening that are sensible, sustainable and tailored to the situation at hand.

America needs a federal government that assertively promotes and helps to coordinate that, not one in which experts like Tony Fauci and Deborah Birx tiptoe around a president’s tender ego.

“I can sit here with you for three hours listing — boom, boom, boom — what good leadership would look like and how many more lives would be saved if we followed that path, and it’s just incredibly upsetting,” Garrett said. “I feel like I’m just coming out of maybe three weeks of being in a funk because of the profound disappointment that there’s not a whisper of it.”

Instead of that whisper, she hears wailing: the sirens of ambulances carrying coronavirus patients to hospitals near her apartment in Brooklyn Heights, New York, where she has been home alone, in lockdown, since early March. “If I don’t get hugged soon, I’m going to go bananas,” she told me. “I’m desperate to be hugged.”

Me, too. Especially after her omens.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

© 2020 New York Times News Service

btn_donateCC_LG

Please Donate

 

And You Thought It Was An Easy Job.


TOTUS rode into office on low voter turnout and immediately began his live streaming of lies, innuendo and poor governance. The worst elements of the Congress immediately latched onto his ineptitude and used that to conjure up their own “shadow” government based on purely party and self serving politics. It became apparent that TOTUS was under water as his work habits did not coincide with how the rest of the government and the wider world works. The job of President is 24-7 and consists of READING and Listening to experienced and experts in their respective fields, not on air pundits and opinionators. There is no substitute for first hand information especially when you have to interact with world leaders and the people whom you were elected to serve. There is no automatic input of knowledge, this job requires work and effort of the kind that brings different opinions not just opinions that you like. Accusations, wild rants and fights with world leaders, reporters is not a reasonable course of action for a leader which really tells more about your shortcomings and the inability to grow into the job. There is no light bulb type idea situation here just the ability to listen and understand what is being presented in order to make informed decisions. Any person with average intelligence (or even below) has the ability to understand this concept, yet it seems to have eluded you.

btn_donateCC_LG

Please Donate

 

No Words Required


Clay Bennett Comic Strip for May 02, 2020 Stuart Carlson Comic Strip for May 01, 2020

btn_donateCC_LG

Please Donate

Piers Morgan Says Trump Is Failing America With Self-Serving Briefings


CORONAVIRUS 

“Donald Trump at the moment is failing the American people,” warned Morgan.

Morgan, who won Trump’s reality TV show “Celebrity Apprentice” in 2007, said he’s been watching the president’s daily press briefings on the pandemic with mounting horror.

“All that’s required from the president in those moments, and any world leader, frankly, is they’ve got to be calm, they’ve got to show authority, they have to be honest, they have to be accurate, entirely factual with what they’re telling the people and they have to have an ability to show empathy,” Morgan told Brian Stelter on CNN’s “Reliable Sources.”

“On almost every level of that, Donald Trump at the moment is failing the American people,” he added.

Morgan said it seemed as if Trump believes it’s more important to win the election in November than defeat the outbreak.

“No, it’s not, Donald Trump,” Morgan said. “What is more important right now is saving American lives.”

Morgan also said the tricks that populist leaders like Trump and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson used to get elected don’t work in a crisis.

“It’s not about partisan politics anymore,” he said. “It’s about plain war crisis leadership.”

btn_donateCC_LG

Please Donate

 

W.H.O., Now Trump’s Scapegoat, Warned About Coronavirus Early and Often


 

By Richard Pérez-Peña and Donald G. McNeil Jr.

April 16, 2020

Updated 8:14 a.m. ET

The World Health Organization, always cautious, acted more forcefully and faster than many national governments. But President Trump has decided to cut off U.S. funding to the organization.

On Jan. 22, two days after Chinese officials first acknowledged the serious threat posed by the new virus ravaging the city of Wuhan, the chief of the World Health Organization held the first of what would be months of almost daily media briefings, sounding the alarm, telling the world to take the outbreak seriously.

But with its officials divided, the W.H.O., still seeing no evidence of sustained spread of the virus outside of China, declined the next day to declare a global public health emergency. A week later, the organization reversed course and made the declaration.

Those early days of the epidemic illustrated the strengths and weaknesses of the W.H.O., an arm of the United Nations that is now under fire by President Trump, who on Tuesday ordered a cutoff of American funding to the organization.

With limited, constantly shifting information to go on, the W.H.O. showed an early, consistent determination to treat the new contagion like the threat it would become, and to persuade others to do the same. At the same time, the organization repeatedly praised China, acting and speaking with a political caution born of being an arm of the United Nations, with few resources of its own, unable to do its work without international cooperation.

Mr. Trump, deflecting criticism that his own handling of the crisis left the United States unprepared, accused the W.H.O. of mismanaging it, called the organization “very China-centric” and said it had “pushed China’s misinformation.”

“So much death has been caused by their mistakes,” President Trump said of the World Health Organization during a White House briefing on Tuesday.

But a close look at the record shows that the W.H.O. acted with greater foresight and speed than many national governments, and more than it had shown in previous epidemics. And while it made mistakes, there is little evidence that the W.H.O. is responsible for the disasters that have unfolded in Europe and then the United States.

The W.H.O. needs the support of its international members to accomplish anything — it has no authority over any territory, it cannot go anywhere uninvited, and it relies on member countries for its funding. All it can offer is expertise and coordination — and even most of that is borrowed from charities and member nations.

The W.H.O. has drawn criticism as being too close to Beijing — a charge that grew louder as the agency repeatedly praised China for cooperation and transparency that others said were lacking. China’s harsh approach to containing the virus drew some early criticism from human rights activists, but it proved effective and has since been adopted by many other countries.

A crucial turning point in the pandemic came on Jan. 20, after China’s central government sent the country’s most famous epidemiologist, Zhong Nanshan, to Wuhan to investigate the new coronavirus racing through that city of 11 million people. Dr. Zhong delivered a startling message on national television: Local officials had covered up the seriousness of the outbreak, the contagion spread quickly between people, doctors were dying and everyone should avoid the city.

Dr. Zhong, an eccentric 83-year-old who led the fight against the SARS outbreak of 2002 and 2003, was one of few people in China with enough standing to effectively call Wuhan’s mayor, Zhou Xianwang, a rising official in the Communist Party, a liar.

Mr. Zhou, eager to see no disruption in his plans for a local party congress from Jan. 11 to 17 and a potluck dinner for 40,000 families on Jan. 18, appears to have had his police and local health officials close the seafood market, threaten doctors and assure the public that there was little or no transmission.

Less than three days after Dr. Zhong’s warning was broadcast, China locked down the city, preventing anyone from entering or leaving and imposing strict rules on movement within it — conditions it would later extend far behind Wuhan, encompassing tens of millions of people.

Dr. Zhong Nanshan announced on Jan. 20 that local officials had covered up the seriousness of the outbreak.Credit…Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The national government reacted in force, punishing local officials, declaring that anyone who hid the epidemic would be “forever nailed to history’s pillar of shame,” and deploying tens of thousands of soldiers, medical workers and contact tracers.

The W.H.O. acted more forcefully and faster than many national governments. It was the day of the lockdown that the W.H.O. at first declined to declare a global emergency, its officials split and expressing concern about identifying a particular country as a threat, and about the impact of such a declaration on people in China. Such caution is a standard — if often frustrating — fact of life for United Nations agencies, which operate by consensus and have usually avoided even a hint of criticizing nations directly.

Despite Dr. Zhong’s warning about human-to-human transmission, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the W.H.O.’s director-general, said there was not yet any evidence of sustained transmission outside China.

“That doesn’t mean it won’t happen,” Dr. Tedros said.

“Make no mistake,” he added. “This is an emergency in China, but it has not yet become a global health emergency. It may yet become one.”

The W.H.O. was still trying to persuade China to allow a team of its experts to visit and investigate, which did not occur until more than three weeks later. And the threat to the rest of the world on Jan. 23 was not yet clear — only about 800 cases and 25 deaths had been reported, with only a handful of infections and no deaths reported outside China.

“In retrospect, we all wonder if something else could have been done to prevent the spread we saw internationally early on, and if W.H.O. could have been more aggressive sooner as an impartial judge of the China effort,” said Dr. Peter Rabinowitz, co-director of the MetaCenter for Pandemic Preparedness and Global Health Security at the University of Washington.

Amir Attaran, a public health and law professor at the University of Ottawa, said, “Clearly a decision was taken by Dr. Tedros and the organization to bite their tongues, and to coax China out of its shell, which was partially successful.”

“That in no way supports Trump’s accusation,” he added. “The president is scapegoating, dishonestly.”

It is impossible to know whether the nations of the world would have acted sooner if the W.H.O. had called the epidemic a global emergency, a declaration with great public relations weight, a week earlier than it did.

But day after day, Dr. Tedros, in his rambling style, was delivering less formal warnings, telling countries to contain the virus while it was still possible, to do testing and contact tracing, and isolate those who might be infected. “We have a window of opportunity to stop this virus,” he often said, “but that window is rapidly closing.”

In fact, the organization had already taken steps to address the coronavirus, even before Dr. Zhong’s awful revelation, drawing attention to the mysterious outbreak.

On Jan. 12, Chinese scientists published the genome of the virus, and the W.H.O. asked a team in Berlin to use that information to develop a diagnostic test. Just four days later, they produced a test and the W.H.O. posted online a blueprint that any laboratory around the world could use to duplicate it.

On Jan. 21, China shared materials for its test with the W.H.O., providing another template for others to use.

Some countries and research institutions followed the German blueprint, while others, like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States, insisted on producing their own tests. But a flaw in the initial C.D.C. test, and the agency’s slowness in approving testing by labs other than its own, contributed to weeks of delay in widespread testing in the United States.

In late January, Mr. Trump praised China’s efforts. Now, officials in his administration accuse China of concealing the extent of the epidemic, even after the crackdown on Wuhan, and the W.H.O. of being complicit in the deception. They say that lulled the West into taking the virus less seriously than it should have.

Police officers patrolling Beijing Station in late January.Credit…Kevin Frayer/Getty Images

Larry Gostin, director of the W.H.O.’s Center on Global Health Law, said the organization relied too heavily on the initial assertions out of Wuhan that there was little or no human transmission of the virus.

“The charitable way to look at this is that W.H.O. simply had no means to verify what was happening on the ground,” he said. “The less charitable way to view it is that the W.H.O. didn’t do enough to independently verify what China was saying, and took China at face value.” The W.H.O. was initially wary of China’s internal travel restrictions, but endorsed the strategy after it showed signs of working.

“Right now, the strategic and tactical approach in China is the correct one,” Dr. Michael Ryan, the W.H.O.’s chief of emergency response, said on Feb. 18. “You can argue whether these measures are excessive or restrictive on people, but there is an awful lot at stake here in terms of public health — not only the public health of China but of all people in the world.”

A W.H.O. team — including two Americans, from the C.D.C. and the National Institutes of Health — did visit China in mid-February for more than a week, and its leaders said they were given wide latitude to travel, visit facilities and talk with people.

Whether or not China’s central government intentionally misstated the scale of the crisis, incomplete reporting has been seen in every other hard-hit country. France, Italy and Britain have all acknowledged seriously undercounting cases and deaths among people who were never hospitalized, particularly people in nursing and retirement homes.

New York City this week reported 3,700 deaths it had not previously counted, in people who were never tested. The United States generally leaves it to local coroners whether to test bodies for the virus, and many lack the capacity to do so.

In the early going, China was operating in a fog, unsure of what it was dealing with, while its resources in and around Wuhan were overwhelmed. People died or recovered at home without ever being treated or tested. Official figures excluded, then included, then excluded again people who had symptoms but had never been tested.

On Jan. 31 — a day after the W.H.O.’s emergency declaration — President Trump moved to restrict travel from China, and he has since boasted that he took action before other heads of state, which was crucial in protecting the United States. In fact, airlines had already canceled the great majority of flights from China, and other countries cut off travel from China at around the same time Mr. Trump did.

The first known case in the United States was confirmed on Jan. 20, after a man who was infected but not yet sick traveled five days earlier from Wuhan to the Seattle area, where the first serious American outbreak would occur.

The first major outbreak in the United States occurred in Seattle, at places like the Life Care Center of Kirkland, a nursing home now linked to more than 37 deaths.

The W.H.O. said repeatedly that it did not endorse international travel bans, which it said are ineffectual and can do serious economic harm, but it did not specifically criticize the United States, China or other countries that took that step.

Experts say it was China’s internal travel restrictions, more severe than those in the West, that had the greatest effect, delaying the epidemic’s spread by weeks and allowing China’s government to get ahead of the outbreak.

The W.H.O. later conceded that China had done the right thing. Brutal as they were, China’s tactics apparently worked. Some cities were allowed to reopen in March, and Wuhan did on April 8.

The Trump administration has not been alone in criticizing the W.H.O. Some public health experts and officials of other countries, including Japan’s finance minister, have also said the organization was too deferential to China.

The W.H.O. has altered some of its guidance over time — a predictable complication in dealing with a new pathogen, but one that has spurred criticism. But at times, the agency also gave what appeared to be conflicting messages, leading to confusion.

In late February, before the situation in Italy had turned from worrisome to catastrophic, Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte and other government officials, citing W.H.O. recommendations, said the regional governments of Lombardy and Veneto were doing excessive testing. “We have more people infected because we made more swabs,” Mr. Conte said.

In fact, the W.H.O. had not said to limit testing, though it had said some testing was a higher priority. It was — and still is — calling for more testing in the context of tracing and checking people who had been in contact with infected patients, but few Western countries have done extensive contact tracing.

But the organization took pains not to criticize individual countries — including those that did insufficient testing.

On March 16, Dr. Tedros wrote on Twitter, “We have a simple message for all countries: test, test, test.” Three days later, a W.H.O. spokeswoman said that there was “no ‘one size fits all’ with testing,” and that “each country should consider its strategy based on the evolution of the outbreak.”

The organization was criticized for not initially calling the contagion a pandemic, meaning an epidemic spanning the globe. The term has no official significance within the W.H.O., and officials insisted that using it would not change anything, but Dr. Tedros began to do so on March 11, explaining that he made the change to draw attention because too many countries were not taking the group’s warnings seriously enough.

Reporting was contributed by Selam Gebrekidan, Javier Hernandez, Jason Horowitz, Adam Nossiter, Knvul Sheikh and Roni Caryn Rabin.

btn_donateCC_LG

Please Donate

 

DUDE! IT IS NOT ABOUT YOU!!


In another time a real leader would be leading with information from experts and re assuring citizens about the issue no matter what it is. In this case we have a consummate liar whose stack and trade is the con and garnering as much money for himself and his family as he can. The worst of this is the ongoing “con” of the American people. The secret to his con is to lie, then lie, then lie, then lie. MA.
Politics

Trump now says he’ll be ‘authorizing’ governors to reopen their states at the ‘most appropriate’ time

Peter Weber
The Week

President Trump’s incorrect assertion Monday that he has “total” authority over when states lift or relax coronavirus mitigation rules “caught his aides off guard and prompted them to study whether Trump would have such authority in a time of emergency like the ongoing pandemic,” The Washington Post reports. Trump continued pushing the idea Tuesday, suggesting that disobeying his orders to reopen the economy would be akin to “mutiny.”

Governors from both parties noted pointedly on Tuesday that they have and will retain the authority to lift social distancing rules they put in place. By his press conference Tuesday night, Trump largely reversed course.

“I will be speaking to all 50 governors very shortly and I will then be authorizing each individual governor of each individual state to implement a reopening, and a very powerful reopening plan, of their state at a time and in a manner as most appropriate,” Trump said. “The day will be very close,” and in some states “maybe even before the date of May 1.” He added that “the governors will be very, very respectful of the presidency,” but they “are responsible, they have to take charge, they have to do a great job,” or he might “close ’em up and start all over again.”

“Trump outlined a vision in which workers would be tested, perhaps on a weekly basis, and governors would test travelers arriving at their states’ borders,” The Associated Press reports. “But the U.S. is nowhere near having that kind of infrastructure.” Atypically, Trump ended the press conference without letting federal health officials field questions.

Earlier Tuesday, Trump appeared to threaten to withhold federal assistance from states that don’t obey him, oddly placing himself in the role of Capt. William Bligh.

 

One official told the Post that “Trump is frustrated that the governors are getting so much credit and no blame while he gets all the blame and none of the credit,” specifically complaining about New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D). Trump tweeted Tuesday that Cuomo has been “begging” for supplies but “now he seems to want Independence! That won’t happen!”

btn_donateCC_LG

Please Donate

 

Trump likely to announce new curbs on funding for World Health Organization this week


 TOTUS continues to blame everyone else for COVID 19, this is not the time to reduce any payments to WHO (World Health Organization). Any issues with their actions should be addressed once this epidemic is controlled. TOTUS cannot do that since his ego is bigger than his mouse sized brain (which has less intelligence). TOTUS has one thought: ME! and how will I look in this situation. MA
Anne Gearan
President Trump is likely to announce restrictions on U.S. funding for the World Health Organization this week over its handling of the coronavirus pandemic, as the administration and conservative allies ramped up their criticism that the United Nations agency catered to China early in the outbreak and jeopardized global health.

Donald Trump wearing a suit and tie: President Trump speaks with members of the coronavirus task force during a briefing in response to the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House on Friday.© Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post President Trump speaks with members of the coronavirus task force during a briefing in response to the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House on Friday.

Trump hinted at a temporary hold on U.S. funding Friday but said he wanted to wait until after Easter to announce anything. He said his administration would discuss the organization “in great detail” this week, adding he did not want to go further “before we had all the facts.”

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and other U.S. officials are expected to recommend to Trump how to dock or condition payments to the agency as Republicans in Congress seek documentation of WHO dealings with China, said people familiar with White House and State Department discussions who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the private conversations.

“They are very, very China-centric,” Trump said Friday. “China always seems to get the better of the argument and I don’t like that, I really don’t like that. I don’t think that’s appropriate. I don’t think it’s fair to the American people.”

Speaking at the daily White House coronavirus news conference, Trump focused on the level of U.S. funding and the disparity with China’s contribution. The administration review is expected to be broader, to consider how well the agency responded in December, January and February as the virus began spreading rapidly in China and then beyond its borders, said the people familiar with the talks.

At issue are ongoing voluntary U.S. payments to the U.N. health body, based in Geneva. The United States is the largest single donor to the WHO, with “assessed” or mandatory funding and larger voluntary contributions that often go to fund specific projects or crisis response.

The United States has provided the agency with $893 million during its current two-year funding period, the health news website statnews.com calculated last week. Funding varies year by year. Chinese contributions are a fraction of that.

Republicans in Congress are seeking documents from the WHO and calling for investigations of contacts between WHO officials and Chinese government officials. The White House backs those efforts but could hold up funding before results are in.

“The money is not guaranteed if WHO does not do its mission,” a senior administration official said.

The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the administration has not decided how to proceed, said the quarrel is less with the organization’s health professionals and more with its political leadership.

“The problem is not the WHO system. The system has good people,” the official said. “It’s about comments made from the leadership — which went beyond what I am told their own staff wanted to say.”

The president has piled on to rising conservative criticism of the WHO, which is paired with criticism of China as deceptive and defensive during the crucial early weeks of the crisis.

But this criticism ignores that Trump also was complimentary of China’s efforts to combat the outbreak earlier this year — a stance that may have been influenced by his desire for a trade deal with Beijing.

“China has been working very hard to contain the Coronavirus,” the president tweeted on Jan. 24. “The United States greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency. It will all work out well. In particular, on behalf of the American People, I want to thank President Xi!”

Weeks later, on Feb. 18, Trump again complimented President Xi Jinping’s efforts to mitigate the outbreak.

“I think President Xi is working very hard. As you know, I spoke with him recently,” he told reporters. “He’s working really hard. It’s a tough problem. I think he’s going to do — look, I’ve seen them build hospitals in a short period of time. I really believe he wants to get that done, and he wants to get it done fast. Yes, I think he’s doing it very professionally.”

Trump later changed his tone toward Beijing, saying it could have provided more information earlier about the spread of the coronavirus.

“No, they weren’t transparent. They were transparent at that time, but when we saw what happened, they could have been transparent much earlier than they were,” he said on March 21.

Critics of the WHO note that it has also taken a soft approach toward U.S. efforts to mitigate the pandemic despite widespread criticism of how the Trump administration has responded. The question, they argue, is whether the WHO is taking a conciliatory approach toward major financial patrons, including the United States and China, as opposed to solely favoring the communist regime in Beijing.

For Trump, the focus on the WHO, a U.N. entity, is an attempt shifts some blame from his own early reaction, when he dismissed the virus as no threat to the United States. The president has said he “inherited” a health system that wasn’t up to the task and blamed Democrats and the news media for hyping the threat. But he has never offered a full accounting of what his own administration was doing to protect the country in late 2019 and the first weeks of January, the period before and during the entrance and initial spread of the virus in the United States.

Accurate assessments of the risk at the outset could have given the U.S. government a jump on the need for social distancing and other preventive measures and lead time to procure additional tests, masks, respirators and other equipment now in short supply, said two people who have spoken with Trump about the WHO

“We’re going to have an announcement on the World Health Organization sometime next week,” Trump said Friday. “As you know, we give them approximately $500 million dollars a year. And we’re going to be talking about that subject next week. We’ll have a lot to say about it. We’ll hold it.”

He had started attacking the agency by name several days before, on Tuesday, when he tweeted that “The WHO really blew it,” and noted the heavy share of U.S. funding the agency receives.

Speaking to reporters hours later on Tuesday, Trump went further.

“We’re going to put a hold on money spent to the WHO. We’re going to put a very powerful hold on it and we’re going to see,” Trump said Tuesday. “They called it wrong. They call it wrong. They really, they missed the call.”

He backed off that threat during the same press briefing, saying the decision had not been made, but has continued to criticize the agency.

Accusing the WHO of being slow to react allows Trump an I-told-you-so moment. The organization pointedly dissented from Trump’s decision in late January to impose severe travel restrictions on travelers from China. Trump has claimed ever since that the decision saved American lives and complained that he was not given credit for foresight.

“They criticized me very strongly when I said that we’re going to shut down flights coming in from China, and especially from certain parts of China, but from China generally,” Trump said Wednesday. “We were criticized very badly.”

Pointing a finger at the WHO also fits with Trump’s long-standing skepticism about the United Nations and complaints that the United States spends too much and gets too little from international organizations.

On Friday, he likened the WHO to the World Trade Organization, a much more frequent target of Trump’s ire, saying both bodies have routinely taken advantage of the United States.

For many conservatives aligned with Trump, the issue is equally about skepticism that the WHO is bloated, ineffective or biased, and about alleged Chinese perfidy.

Former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley appeared twice on Fox News last week to accuse the agency of covering for China. She backed a call for a full investigation from Sen. James E. Risch (R-Idaho), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Risch is expected to speak by phone early this week with WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, before the Senate effort moves ahead, a Republican Senate aide said.

As other conservatives have done, Haley pointed to Taiwan, which China considers a rogue province, to make the point that China was duplicitous.

“I mean look at the timeline. You’ve got, December 30, Taiwan goes and tells the WHO ‘we believe and have evidence that there’s human-to-human transmission.’ Then you have, January 14, the head of the WHO, Tedros, says ‘we don’t see any evidence of human-to-human transmission.’” Haley said Friday on “Fox and Friends.”

At a press briefing last week, Tedros predicted that the United States “will continue to contribute its share.”

“I would like to take this opportunity to thank the U.S. for its generous support so far,” he said.

On Thursday, several Republican members of the House Oversight Committee requested documents and other information from the WHO about its relationship with China and its response to the pandemic.

“Throughout the crisis, the WHO has shied away from placing any blame on the Chinese government, which is in essence the Communist Party of China,” the lawmakers wrote to the WHO chief.

Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) was among those signing the letter. In an interview Friday, he said he “100 percent” supports a holdup of U.S. funding for the WHO, which amounts to roughly 15 percent of the agency’s budget.

“You would stop the check,” while questions are answered, he said.

Comer said he and his colleagues want to know “did they drop the ball and make honest mistakes or were they going along with Chinese propaganda and taking China’s word for it on what the problem was.”

Comer said the agency’s early pronouncements on the outbreak were “completely inaccurate.”

Several Republican Senate aides interviewed about the WHO’s response criticized it as halting and incomplete but said it is not yet clear whether the agency was complicit in any Chinese whitewash of the outbreak.

In the early going, the agency was balancing its need for access to on-the-ground information from China, which would affect the effectiveness of the agency’s response, with its duty to speak truthfully about the threat, one Republican Senate aide said.

The WHO’s complicity in any coverup will rest on whether the agency went beyond a need to publicly extend the benefit of the doubt and actively fronted for the Chinese government, the aide said.

Carol Morello contributed to this report.

btn_donateCC_LG

Please Donate

Trump is desperately seeking to avoid blame


Opinion by Jill Filipovic
Donald Trump et al. sitting at a table: WASHINGTON, DC - APRIL 07: U.S. President Donald Trump speaks to reporters following a meeting of the coronavirus task force in the Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House on April 7, 2020 in Washington, DC. The president today removed the independent chairman of a committee tasked with overseeing the roll out of the $2 trillion coronavirus bailout package. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)© Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images WASHINGTON, DC – APRIL 07: U.S. President Donald Trump speaks to reporters following a meeting of the coronavirus task force in the Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House on April 7, 2020 in Washington, DC. The president today removed the independent chairman of a committee tasked with overseeing the roll out of the $2 trillion coronavirus bailout package. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Editor’s note: The opinions in this article are the author’s, as published by our content partner, and do not necessarily represent the views of MSN or Microsoft.

President Donald Trump has royally screwed up the federal government’s coronavirus response, and he knows it. And he’s doing what he always does: Instead of fixing any of the many problems he’s caused, he’s trying to weasel his way out of blame and doing all he can to dodge oversight and responsibility.

On Tuesday, Trump demoted Glenn Fine, the man tapped last month to independently oversee spending on the $2 trillion federal coronavirus stimulus package. Because Fine, who was the acting inspector general from the Defense Department, was removed from that role, he also lost his chairmanship of the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee (only inspectors general are eligible to be on that committee). No explanation was offered.

This isn’t just about the specter of the President potentially attempting to assert free rein over the outlay of taxpayer-funded relief. American lives are at stake. The health of our economy — not just Wall Street winnings, but the livelihoods of tens of millions of Americans, and our basic ability to put food on our tables and care for our families — is at risk.

Fine’s role — the one that will now be assumed in an “acting” capacity by Sean W. O’Donnell, who will do this along with his other job as Environmental Protection Agency Inspector General — was to make sure that an enormous stimulus package was being spent as allocated, with minimal waste and no abuse or corruption.

It’s disturbing that Americans now may have to worry that our President and his cronies could turn a relief package into a vehicle for self-dealing and a sweetheart deal for the rich, but here we are.

COVID-19 Symptoms Survey

Help researchers at the Regenstrief Institute track the outbreak
Go to the survey

Fine had been picked by a group of independent federal inspectors general who determined he would do the best job. According to The New York Times, the former Justice Department inspector general “earned a reputation for aggression and independence in scrutinizing the FBI’s use of surveillance and other law enforcement powers in the years after the September 11, 2001, attacks.”

But in Trumpland, such competence and expertise aren’t a requirement but a barrier, especially when it comes to oversight duties. The incompetent man at the top is desperate not to have his inadequacy revealed.

Fine’s head is just the latest to roll as the President has been systematically guillotining watchdogs across the federal government. In a transparently vindictive move, he also removed Michael Atkinson last Friday as the Intelligence Community inspector general. Atkinson had done his job in informing Congress about the whistleblower complaint that led to Trump’s impeachment. Trump doesn’t like being held responsible for his actions, so Atkinson was out.

On Monday Trump also attacked Health and Human Services Inspector General Christi Grimm for doing her job. Grimm’s office had reported what Americans already know: That there are widespread delays in testing for coronavirus, and serious supply shortages at the nation’s hospitals. None of this is news to anyone. But Trump nonetheless tweeted that the report was “Another Fake Dossier!”

Trump seems to fancy himself more of a king than a President. The same man who once pledged to “drain the swamp” seems to love mucking around in it, and attacks anyone who tries to clean it up.

No administration is perfect — remember the Obamacare rollout debacle? Nobody expects error-free governance, but good leaders are able to deal with mistakes, swiftly correct them, and accept independent oversight. Anything else isn’t democracy, it’s dictatorship. Americans in urgent need of relief during and after the pandemic need to see this stimulus plan wisely and efficiently dispatched.

There are about 400,000 confirmed coronavirus cases and more than 12,800 dead — and those numbers may be significant underestimates. Without effective oversight — and there is no reason to believe that Glenn Fine would not have provided it — it will be impossible to tell if the stimulus package is being used efficiently to help as many people as possible. Without immediate, unflinching feedback on how Health and Human Services is managing this crisis, it will be harder to know the ways to improve the stimulus in real time and stem the tide of disease, death and financial ruin.

Donald Trump could not care less about the health and well-being of the American people. He has no attachment to good governance, professional ethics, or public service. He doesn’t like independent watchdogs because they’re inconvenient for him; he prefers lapdogs. And so he is exploiting the pandemic to sack anyone who might point out just how terribly he has mangled the response.

The result won’t just be a swampier and more corrupt White House. We Americans may pay with our lives.

btn_donateCC_LG

Please Donate