They All Have Blood on Their Hands

As I post this, America is about to endure one of the worst months in its history as we approach the peak of the coronavirus pandemic. According to those within the President's circle along with other epidemiologists, we may suffer as many as 100,000 or more deaths in the next month or so.

While we ponder this grim prediction, it's only natural to wonder if at least some of this loss of life was avoidable. Of course, the President didn't cause the coronavirus, but he did spend a couple of months downplaying and denying it before suddenly pivoting to calling it a pandemic.

This roughly two month delay before acknowledging the pandemic is clearly shown in this video, Trump's Coronavirus Calendar.

The Boston Globe recently wrote this scathing editorial on the President's performance thus far, A president unfit for a pandemic which I urge the reader to look through. But for now, these excerpts:

Timing is everything in pandemic response: It can make the difference between a contained local outbreak that endures a few weeks and an uncontrollable contagion that afflicts millions. The Trump administration has made critical errors over the past two months, choosing early on to develop its own diagnostic test, which failed, instead of adopting the World Health Organization’s test — a move that kneecapped the US coronavirus response and, by most public health experts’ estimation, will cost thousands if not hundreds of thousands of American lives. Rather than making the expected federal effort to mobilize rapidly to distribute needed gowns, masks, and ventilators to ill-equipped hospitals and to the doctors and nurses around the country who are left unprotected treating a burgeoning number of patients, the administration has instead been caught outbidding individual states...trying to purchase medical supplies. 

The months the administration wasted with prevarication about the threat and its subsequent missteps will amount to exponentially more COVID-19 cases than were necessary. In other words, the president has blood on his hands.

But other than this two month delay, we need to dig further.

To hearken back to Nixon and the Watergate years, there was the question: What did the president know? And when did he know it? When the "smoking gun" tape emerged, Nixon was busted and soon had to resign.

More recently, there was Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US, an intelligence briefing delivered to President George W. Bush 36 days before the September 11 attacks. So Bush did know about the threat ahead of time? Could he have stopped the attacks if he had pursued this further? This is unknowable. After all, there wasn't a time or place given for the threatened attacks. What's important is that he didn't even try. Ironically, in a 2016 presidential debate, candidate Donald Trump attacked Jeb Bush blaming his brother George W. Bush for 9/11 saying "George Bush had the chance [to prevent 9/11] and he didn't listen to the advice of his C.I.A."

This is ironic because U.S. intelligence reports from January and February warned about a likely pandemic.

U.S. intelligence agencies were issuing ominous, classified warnings in January and February about the global danger posed by the coronavirus while President Trump and lawmakers played down the threat and failed to take action that might have slowed the spread of the pathogen, according to U.S. officials familiar with spy agency reporting. 

Taken together, the reports and warnings painted an early picture of a virus that showed the characteristics of a globe-encircling pandemic that could require governments to take swift actions to contain it. But despite that constant flow of reporting, Trump continued publicly and privately to play down the threat the virus posed to Americans.

To make things worse, for the last 2 years, he slashed government agencies responsible for handling the coronavirus outbreak.

So Trump knew about the impending coronavirus pandemic from intelligence briefings going back to January. To put a bow on this, we return to the Trump's Coronavirus Calendar shown above and refer to his remarks on March 17. Trump didn't want us to believe that he was clueless about the impending pandemic, so he included this remark: "This is a pandemic. I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic. All you had to do is look at other countries."

Blood on his hands? I know how I feel but I will leave it to the reader to decide if this is hyperbole.

But there are a host of other suspects that appear to also have blood on their hands.

Richard Burr and Kelly Loeffler

Facing particularly stark questions Friday morning are two GOP senators, Richard Burr of North Carolina and Kelly Loeffler of Georgia. New disclosures show both of them dumped between hundreds of thousands and millions of dollars worth of stock early in the coronavirus outbreak.

They did so even as they were offering public assurances about the government’s ability to deal with the situation — and even as one of them, Burr, was offering some much more dire comments privately. Burr, as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, also reportedly received daily briefings about the threat.

They could have been heroes and sounded the alarm. Instead, they cashed in.

Alarm, Denial, Blame: The Pro-Trump Media’s Coronavirus Distortion

Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh et al. Did Trump's deceptions feed off of right-wing media or was it the other way around? Both is a safe guess But hey, this is America and they are protected by the First Amendment. But free speech is not absolute. There is the oft used example that you can't yell fire in a crowded theater. Your free speech should not be able to inflict direct harm of others. But they enabled Trump in his denial of the dangers of the impending pandemic which has and will most certainly result in many avoidable deaths. Furthermore, there is the endless skepticism about the virtues of the social distancing (even today) that even Trump's personnel are pleading for to keep the fatalities to a minimum. Instead they are more in favor of keeping businesses open. I think it would be safe to say that a great majority of those Americans who don't favor the social distancing orders follow Rush Limbaugh and/or Fox News. But having said all of this, I do not favor that they be censored. But they do deserve wide condemnation for their actions. Which leads us to...

All of the Republican governors who have been holdouts in calling for shelter in place orders. Florida Governor DeSantis is a notable offender holding out for a long time in a populous state with a large elderly population. When he finally gave in and announced state shelter in place orders, he inexplicably granted an exemption for church goers to assemble. I guess it's part of Republican ideology not to interfere in people's lives. But the longer they take to issue shelter in place orders, the more likely needless deaths will occur. It's easy to feel bulletproof if you live in rural America where cows outnumber people. But the virus has been reported in every state. If their luck runs out, these areas which often have many uninsured and few hospitals or doctors for that matter may be hit especially hard.

In his own category for what might be called batshit crazy with blood on his hands is Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro who has called the virus a “little flu,” is the sole major world leader continuing to question the merits of lockdown measures to fight the pandemic. Trumpian behavior on steroids if you ask me.

So finally, the question some may ask is why are we dealing with what happened in the past when we have this huge challenge in front of us with none other than Trump to lead us through it? A fair question. 

When we are hopefully past this and into the election season, there will be time to discuss where we are and how we got there. But with the passage of time, memories can fade and a flurry of revisionist history will try to make everything that happened seem to be OK. But it wasn't. And we can't forget that. I will conclude with the closing line of the Boston Globe editorial.

...come November, there must be a reckoning for the lives lost, and for the vast, avoidable suffering about to ensue under the president’s watch.

Post Script 

Dear Readers, At about the time I completed this blog posting, this blockbuster investigative article was published by the Washington Post.

Denial and dysfunction plagued U.S. government as coronavirus raged

Like a few other articles now coming out, journalists are trying to determine what happened during those 70 days between when the coronavirus was first discovered in China and the beginning of when Trump decided to take up the fight against the pandemic in earnest.

For those who want to have a deeper understanding of those first two months after the virus was first spotted in China, please take the time to read this article. But it is a lengthy read so as a service to the reader, I will offer this simplified synopsis.  

There are several threads to this story. One was that China was not cooperative with sharing information on the viral outbreak, including the refusal to share viral samples that would enable researchers to try and develop drugs to attack the virus. Secondly, it was a fatal mistake to exclusively rely on the CDC to be responsible for producing all of the mass testing that would be required if the pandemic arrived here.. It was a job that they were not really designed to do and they ultimately failed which lost us a lot of time.

But the main thread was about a good guy who tried to help unlike the list of bad guys in the blog posting above. HHS Secretary Alex Azar saw very quickly the virus outbreak in China could pose a catastrophic threat to America  So he did everything he could to meet this threat head on. Spoiler alert: He failed. It wasn’t for lack of effort. There’s only so much that a Cabinet level official can do on his own, especially, when massive amounts of money are needed. But worst of all, he had a frustrating time getting his boss to pay attention to him when he was trying to sound the alarm. The article describes a President who was more preoccupied with impeachment, campaign rallies and golf.

Eventually, things got bad enough so Trump could not ignore the situation anymore. But then Azar received the final insult.

...Azar, who once ran the response, has since been sidelined, with his agency disempowered in decision-making and his performance pilloried by a range of White House officials, including [Jared] Kushner.