Tag: Trump botched COVID-19 response killed over 500000 Americans

Trump received COVID vaccine at White House in January

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Former President Trump and former first lady Melania Trump were both vaccinated at the White House in January, a Trump adviser tells Axios. 

Why it matters: Trump declared at CPAC on Sunday that “everybody” should get the coronavirus vaccine — the first time he’s encouraged his supporters, who have been more skeptical of getting vaccinated, to do so.

  • It’s unclear which vaccine they received.
  • Vaccine hesitancy is higher among white Republicans than any other demographic group, and it hasn’t been improving as the vaccination effort continues, according to Civiqs polling.
  • The news of the Trumps getting vaccinated was first reported by the New York Times. Continue reading.

Fauci unloads on Trump: ‘He did things that were terrible’ when I contradicted him

Dr. Anthony Fauci unloaded on former President Donald Trump in an interview with the UK newspaper The Telegraph.

Throughout the interview, Fauci recounted how his former boss would routinely take bad advice on how to handle the novel coronavirus pandemic and would act out whenever anyone with expertise contradicted him.

“When it became clear that in order to maintain my integrity and to get the right message [across] I had to publicly disagree with him, he did things — or allowed things to happen — that were terrible,” Fauci told the paper. “Like he allowed Peter Navarro [Trump’s trade adviser] to write an editorial in USA Today saying that almost everything I’ve ever said was wrong.” Continue reading.

Over 500,000 dead from coronavirus in U.S.

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More than half a million people in the U.S. have died from the coronavirus as of Monday, according to Johns Hopkins data.

Why it matters: The death toll is larger than the total number of U.S. soldiers killed in action in World War I, World War II, and the Vietnam War combined. It comes just one year after the country’s first coronavirus death was confirmed.

  • “Each death has left an empty space in communities across America: a bar stool where a regular used to sit, one side of a bed unslept in, a home kitchen without its cook,” the New York Times’ Julie Bosman writes.

The scale of the horrifying loss is hard to visualize. 

  • If 500,000 names were listed on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the height of the structure would be 87 feet tall (instead of 10 feet), the Washington Post figures.
  • 1 person died of the coronavirus every 28 seconds in January, a Post analysis found. Continue reading.