Trump Said

                                 Trump Said

"We have the best testing in the world," Trump recently told employees at Owens & Minor Inc. in Allentown, Pa. (Owens and Minor make medical equipment) “Could be that testing’s, frankly, overrated. Maybe it is overrated."

"We have more cases than anybody in the world, but why? Because we do more testing,” Trump said. “When you test, you have a case. When you test you find something is wrong with people. If we didn’t do any testing, we would have very few cases. They don’t want to write that. It’s common sense. We test much more."  Yep. Really. That’s what he said. “Very few cases” is represented by more than 86,000 dead out of almost a million and a half cases.

      Rather than just chuck a pile of real data at you, I’ll let the graph above largely speak for itself.  Note that this is an “apples to apples” graph, since the data is presented as “number of tests performed per 1000 population”. This grouping is the usual comparison standard I (and the rest of the world) use - the OECD nations. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development is an intergovernmental economic organization, co-founded with 37 member countries by the US and France, in 1961 to stimulate economic progress and world trade. It is, by far, the most representative standard of comparison for the US vis a vis the world’s similar economies.  

        Obviously, the claim that “We test much more” is, simply put, a lie. The OECD “average” number of people (the red line) tested per 1000 is 22.9. That, I remind you is the average number. Contrary to Trump’s on the spot lie, (he spoke, he lied, it follows as the night does the day) the US is well below the OECD average at 15.6 tests per 1000. Almost as troubling is the statement, “‘They’ don’t want to write that.”  “They”, per Trump have now become anyone who recounts a fact that contradicts a lie such as this. This has become typical of the man whose self- proclaimed “genius” has started to look more and more like the incoherent ramblings of the village imbecile.

And on May 11, we have this whopper:

“Germany and the United States are the two best in deaths per 100,000 people, which, frankly, to me, that's perhaps the most important number there is.”

        Proving the lie here is ridiculously simple. That cesspool of liberal propaganda, Johns Hopkins University has continually tracked such data for months and released this table 3 days after Trump’s statement:

 Data set Johns Hopkins 5/14/2020

Country    case/fatality ratio (%)   deaths per100k

US                    6.1                         25.26

Brazil               6.9                           6.68

Germany          4.5                           9.51

Iran                  6.0                           8.38

Turkey             2.8                           4.87
Russia              0.9                           1.6

Poland             5.0                           2.32

Austria            3.9                           7.08

Sweden           12.3                       34.66

Denmark         4.9                          9.26

Norway           2.8                          4.37

Canada            7.5                        15.09

This data set actually tracks world-wide figures, some are worse, many, including much of Africa, are better, as in fewer deaths per 100,000 cases, which is the basis of the Trump statement.    

       Clearly, while not the worst, the US has more than 2 ½ times as many deaths per 100k as Germany. However, contrary to Trump’s allegation, Denmark, Brazil, Turkey, Austria, Norway, Canada, Iran and Poland also have far fewer. Worth noting here, are the high numbers for Sweden which, alone among the European nations, did not stress social distancing and has paid the price in each “lives lost” statistic.

     Using another and even more “level playing field” statistic, that being the percentage of how many died per diagnosed case, Trump is still wrong. Nine of the eleven representative countries I took from the far larger data sheet, have fewer deaths per case than the US. world-wide the difference is even greater. Trump’s statement implies that we and Germany stand atop the list. Germany has done far better than we, but others have done better than both, while some, such as the UK and Netherlands have had it worse.      

In the realm of what the f**k does he even mean?:

Trump has repeatedly said things like “We're very close to a vaccine.” (this in February) when this was categorically denied by real medical persons, he then had his mouthpieces say that he was actually speaking about an Ebola vaccine. (You know, to combat the current Ebola pandemic?)

More recently, (May 8^th) Trump old reporters he now believes the virus will “go away without a vaccine.” “This is going to go away without a vaccine, it’s gonna go away, and we’re not going to see it again, hopefully, after a period of time.”  He has yet to explain why he believes that, and apparently, he actually doesn’t, since his administration, one week later, launched Operation Warp Speed, aimed at accelerating the production of a vaccine. He loves that “space talk”, huh? I’ll betcha if a lab to actually begin producing a vaccine were built, he’d be there to say “engage!” (deepest apologies to Sir Patrick Stewart.)

In truth (Remember that?), Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading expert on infectious disease, told Fox News COVID-19 was “not going to be over to the point of our being able to not do any mitigation until we have a scientifically sound, safe and effective vaccine.” And here’s the good news if there is any: When asked by a reporter who is in charge of the vaccine operation, Trump said, “honestly, I am.” “I’m really in charge of it,” he said. “I think probably more than anything I’m in charge.” We’re sooo f**ked!

Dismantling of the Pandemic response team as a coequal National Security directorate:

        In 2018 and numerous times since that initial declaration, Trump has disavowed responsibility for his Administration's disbanding of the US Pandemic Response Team headed by Rear Adm. R. Timothy Ziemer in 2018.  First a bit of history: some of it excerpted and abridged from an article in Vanity Fair.

        In mid-March 2014, reports of the first cases of Ebola in Guinea triggered efforts inside the Obama White House to track and contain the spread of the virus, which killed around 50% of the people it infected. While less contagious than  Covid-19, an epidemic, or even pandemic, was considered, at least, possible if the disease weren’t confined to West African.  The Obama administration had created clear protocols and chains of command for these kinds of threats. .  (detailed in the “playbook” Bitch McConnell claims doesn’t exist, but which has been verified) 

        Beth Cameron, a former civil servant who ran the White House’s National Security Council Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense, and her team, drew up a memo to Susan Rice, the national-security adviser, and Lisa Monaco, the homeland-security adviser, detailing what was then known about the Ebola outbreak. This memo set off a chain of action that immediately went to the Oval Office and then spread through the government. This was considered to be of such significance that it was a separate directorate, administered by specialists in the field  

        In the summer of 2018, on the advice of John Bolton and at the direction of Trump, the team Cameron once ran was one of three directorates merged into one amid an “overhaul and streamlining” of Donald Trump’s National Security Council. The position Monaco previously held, homeland-security adviser, was downgraded, stripped of its authority to convene the cabinet.

                The argument was, essentially, that even though the global health security team was, in fact, disbanded and lowered in authority, a new NSC unit with a combined responsibility for arms control and biodefense was a perfectly adequate replacement. There have been three temporary administrators, since, none with direct access to the President.

        Officials who worked on past crises and experts on pandemic response believe that Trump’s dismissal—and in some aspects, wholesale discarding—of the Obama administration’s preparedness structures and principles, and the current administration’s ideas about government—that states could and should take responsibility, and that business could be more effective than government at solving problems at this scale—have left them dangerously unprepared.

        So now we are faced with Mitch McConnell’s false claims that the Obama administration left “no playbook” (debunked. It is a 69 pager) and the continued refusal of Donald Trump to lead and, as importantly, do what leaders do, which is accept responsibility for his actions. 

       Trump has yet to do this. Throughout this debacle, he has acted a little schizophrenic about his role. On one hand, ever the narcissist, he wants, even demands, the credit when things go right. On the other hand, he furiously attempts to avoid having to take ownership for the outcome of the effort…he wants the credit without accountability. This simply mirrors his entire life.

        Trump recently became irate when confronted, (by a Fox News reporter, no less) with the issue of why the pandemic preparedness and response directorate had been downgraded. After attempting to deflect the question he “punted.”   “What you just said is a false story,” Trump said. 

“This doctor,” he continued, gesturing to Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious diseases expert, “knows it better than anybody.”

        Suggesting that Dr. Fauci would back him up on his false claim that the office was not disbanded, was skating on some pretty ice. In testimony to Congress just three weeks ago, the doctor was asked by Rep. Gerald Connolly, a Virginia Democrat, if it had been a mistake “to dismantle the office within the National Security Council charged with global health and security?” Fauci’s, response? "I wouldn't necessarily characterize it as a mistake. I would say we worked very well with that office. It would be nice if the office was still there."

        The downgrading and emasculation of the Global Health and Security directorate also hadn’t passed unnoticed by Democratic leaders:

        The very day the directorate’s downgrade (and accompanying isolation from direct POTUS contact) was announced, Senators Elizabeth Warren and Patty Murray wrote an urgent letter to Trump’s (then) national security adviser, John Bolton, demanding a staff-level briefing on how planning for pandemic response would be carried out without the office. As Warren later explained, Bolton refused to provide the briefing or to answer the six specific questions they asked in writing. (Apparently only Republican Senators merit respect?) This prompted a chilling and prescient response from another source:

  “When the next pandemic occurs (and make no mistake, it will) and the federal government is unable to respond in a coordinated and effective fashion to protect the lives of US citizens and others, this decision by John Bolton and Donald Trump will be the reason,” Stephen Schwartz of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists tweeted on May 10, 2018.  and two years later, here we are!    

        And so it is and so it continues to be.