We’re in this terrible situation because the government is in the hands of terrible people (Republicans)
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These sorts of facts can’t be repeated enough:
Public health and national security experts shake their heads when President Donald Trump says the coronavirus “came out of nowhere” and “blindsided the world.”
They’ve been warning about the next pandemic for years and criticized the Trump administration’s decision in 2018 to dismantle a National Security Council directorate at the White House charged with preparing for when, not if, another pandemic would hit the nation.
“It would be nice if the office was still there,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institute of Health, told Congress this week.
Why is the US so far behind other countries with testing?
Experts say it’s due to cuts in federal funding for public health and problems with early testing.
Problems with public health infrastructure Two years ago, the CDC stopped funding epidemic prevention activities in 39 countries, including China. This happened because the Trump administration refused to allocate money to a program that started during the 2014 Ebola outbreak.
Former CDC director Dr. Tom Frieden warned that move “would significantly increase the chance an epidemic will spread without our knowledge and endanger lives in our country and around the world.”
Problems with the testing Malfunctions, shortages and delays in availability have all contributed to the slowdown.
In the first few weeks of the outbreak in the US, the CDC was the only facility in the country that could confirm test results — even though a World Health Organization test became available around the same time.
Some test kits that were sent around the country were flawed — a move that put the US behind about “four to five weeks,” says Dr. Rob Davidson, executive director of the Committee to Protect Medicare.
That four or five week delay by itself will probably end up killing hundreds of thousands of Americans. Those people will have been effectively been murdered (if you’re in the mood to be charitable you can call it negligent homicide) by the Trump administration in particular and the Republican party in general.
This is the bill that’s coming due for the last several decades, during which the Republican party degenerated into an anti-government, anti-science, anti-expertise of every kind death cult. The election of Donald Trump, or someone like him, was the eminently predictable if not inevitable result of that degeneracy.
Never forget; never forgive. Getting rid of Trump without also eventually destroying the Republican party in its present form is the equivalent of removing a primary tumor when the cancer itself has already become virulently metastatic. Any hope for survival requires a far more radical ongoing treatment of the disease itself.