Tag: Trump botched COVID-19 response

Former FDA Chief Calls Out Jared Kushner For Comparing COVID-19 To Common Flu

The number of COVID-19 cases and deaths has remained “fairly persistent” over the last few weeks, the former FDA commissioner noted.

The former head of the Food and Drug Administration criticized Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner for casually comparing COVID-19 to the common flu during an interview Sunday.

“We need to be careful about making comparisons to flu — and the death and disease we see in flu relative to COVID,” former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said on CBS News’ “Face The Nation.”

The number of COVID-19 cases and deaths has remained “fairly persistent” over the last few weeks, noted Gottlieb, a Republican who served in both the Obama and Trump administrations. Continue reading.

Coronavirus infections are rising in children, CDC says

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NOTE: This article is being provided free of charge by The Washington Post.

The number and rate of coronavirus cases in children have risen since the pandemic took hold in the spring, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in recently updated guidance, underscoring the risk for young people and their families as the school year begins.

According to the CDC, the infection rate in children 17 and under increased “steadily” from March to July. While the virus is far more prevalent and severe among adults, the true incidence of infection in American children remains unknown because of a lack of widespread testing, the agency said.

Here are some significant developments: Continue reading.

HHS chief information officer abruptly resigns

José Arrieta and his team have been under considerable pressure inside and outside the administration.

HHS’ chief information officer, José Arrieta, resigned unexpectedly Friday.

Arrieta told senior leaders that he would stay on for up to a month to help with the transition, said two individuals with knowledge of his plans. He departs just four months after the department stood up the public data sharing hub HHS Protect, and a little over a year since he took over as chief information officer.

His departure was first reported by Federal News Network.

Arrieta and his team have been under considerable pressure inside and outside the administration, after HHS in July ordered hospitals to bypass the CDC when reporting certain coronavirus data. Continue reading.

USPS Removes Mailboxes, Shuts Down Letter-Sorting Machines As Mail-In Voting Looms

As Trump’s postmaster thwarts the Postal Service, the USPS warns 46 states that mail-in ballots may not be delivered on time, potentially canceling out those votes.

The U.S. Postal Service removed mail collection boxes in at least four states and is eliminating automatic letter-sorting machines that speed delivery ahead of an expected surge of mail-in ballots in the Nov. 3 elections.

As the Postal Service began to dismantle its own process for speedy mail delivery, it sent a letter to 46 states warning that voters could be disenfranchised because their mail-in ballots may not be delivered in time to make vote deadlines, The Washington Post reported Friday. Some states are quickly moving up deadlines, forcing voters to request or cast ballots sooner.

The startling actions appear to support accusations by Democratic lawmakers and voting rights groups that Postal Service management — now headed by major Donald Trump contributor Louis DeJoy — is sabotaging mail delivery before Election Day. Continue reading.

New Pandemic Poll Shows That Most Voters Now Distrust Trump

New polling underscores the motivations behind Donald Trump’s desperate bid to steal the election by kneecapping vote-by-mail systems at the state level. Trump has 100 percent blown what has become this election’s pivotal issue: the coronavirus.

The new NPR/PBS/Marist poll released Friday showed that fully 71 percent of Americans now consider the coronavirus to be “a real threat.” That’s not only an eye-popping share of the electorate, that’s a major jump from March when 56 percent deemed it a major threat.

The share of Americans who think the pandemic threat is overblown has likewise dropped to just 27 percent from the 38 percent who believed that in March. Continue reading.

Pence brags of jobs he and Trump ‘created’ as unemployment remains at 10%

Analysts say those ‘new’ jobs are mostly from people returning to jobs they lost during the lockdown.

Mike Pence claimed on Wednesday that he and Donald Trump had created more jobs during the coronavirus pandemic than the previous administration created during its entire tenure. In reality, some of the businesses that temporarily closed during the pandemic have reopened, bringing back some of the jobs that lost during the historic unemployment that is still decimating the U.S. economy.

On Fox News, Pence bragged that he and Trump had “made this country stronger, more prosperous in our first three years” and that Trump “has seen us through the worst pandemic in a hundred years.”

“We’ve already created more jobs in the last three months than Joe Biden and Barack Obama created in their eight years in office. I’m excited to tell the story,” Pence said. Continue reading.

‘No way to spin that,’ Romney says of U.S. coronavirus deaths, blaming Trump administration

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This article is provided free of charge by The Washington Post.

Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) offered rare Republican criticism of the Trump administration’s coronavirus response Friday, saying the federal government dismissed the virus’s threat and failed to protect Americans as infections spiraled out of control.

“Short term, I think it’s fair to say we really have not distinguished ourselves in a positive way by how we responded to the crisis when it was upon us,” Romney said in a video interview with the Sutherland Institute. “And the proof of the pudding of that is simply that we have 5 percent of the world’s population but 25 percent of the world’s deaths due to covid-19.”

“And there’s no way to spin that in a positive light,” Romney said. Continue reading.

Trump’s gaslighting $400 bait-and-switch scheme does nothing for unemployed Americans

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Trump and his administration have institutionalized bullshit by disconnecting actions and rhetoric from fact and truth. Their willingness to say anything so long as the results trick the gullible and advance their interests is shocking. Now, congressional inaction on further pandemic economic relief has compounded the Trump con game and opened the door to a cynical political ploy that could bury millions.

Trump signed an executive order last weekend that he and his underlings portray as a lifesaver tossed to people drowning in violent economic seas. The White House pretentiously titled it Memorandum on Authorizing the Other Needs Assistance Program for Major Disaster Declarations Related to Coronavirus Disease 2019.

The pandemic has become an excuse for empty posturing.

The reality is an attempt by the administration and GOP to absolve themselves of blame that could sink Trump’s re-election campaign. In presidential elections, voters keep a keen eye on what their finances tell them. The news for 10s of millions is bad. Continue reading.

America’s Governors Do The Job, Even If Trump Won’t

You’d think that even a president who claimed “absolute authority” would step aside as groups of West Coast and East Coast governors devise strategies for reopening their economies without causing a spike in coronavirus cases. They know their hot zones and travel patterns across state borders. A president committed to the public weal might even ask the governors, “How may I help?”

But that’s not the president we have. Trump commandeered the national conversation with that ridiculous assertion — and then backed down the next day.

In a Monday tweet, he likened the governors to crew members in “Mutiny on the Bounty” and himself to the captain. In the movie, a group of sailors wrest control of the ship from the sadistic Captain Bligh. Trump may have missed the part when Bligh gets sent off in a rowboat — and the ship sails on. Continue reading.

Trump’s New ‘Coronavirus Adviser’ Was Almost Always Dead Wrong

President Donald Trump announced this week that Dr. Scott Atlas, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, will serve as a new “adviser” to the president on COVID-19. Atlas, whose background is in diagnostic radiology, is not an expert in infectious disease but rather a pundit and frequent Fox guest who has been repeatedly wrong about the pandemic.

Atlas, who has appeared 20 times on Fox News since the end of April, predicted in March that there would only be 10,000 deaths from COVID in America, said in April that the pandemic “appears to be entering the containment phase,” and claimed in May that “the curves have been flattened.” More recently, he has taken to making unproven claims downplaying the risk of COVID-19 in considering whether to reopen schools for in-person learning.

But Fox News and other right-wing outlets have elevated his politically convenient though dubious commentary; and on August 12 he gave brief remarks during a White House press briefing after Trump asked him to come up to the podium. Continue reading.