Tag: Trump botched COVID-19 response

Navarro-Fauci battle intensifies, to detriment of Trump

The Hill logoWhite House trade adviser Peter Navarro’s battle with Anthony Fauciintensified on Wednesday, putting the White House in a difficult position as it struggles to downplay evidence of a rift between President Trump and one of the nation’s most trusted health experts. 

In an extraordinary move, Navarro wrote an op-ed in USA Today, the country’s largest newspaper, cataloging his disagreements with Fauci and questioning his credibility, saying the top U.S. infectious disease official’s advice should be taken with “skepticism and caution.”

The Trump White House has since its infancy been characterized by infighting, and Trump has welcomed disagreements among his aides. But Navarro’s effort to take his fight against Fauci public is unusual. Continue reading.

As the coronavirus crisis spins out of control, Trump issues directives — but still no clear plan

Washington Post logoPresident Trump has vowed that the nation’s schools must reopen for the fall semester, but neither he nor his administration has detailed a plan for how to do so safely.

Trump has boasted that the United States leads the world in coronavirus testing, yet he has declined to produce a national testing plan, and in many communities tests can take a week or longer to process, rendering their results all but useless in slowing the spread.

And with case numbers spiking from coast to coast and fears mounting of additional outbreaks this fall and winter, Trump’s most clearly articulated plan to end the covid-19 pandemic is to predict the virus will “just disappear” and to bank on a vaccine being ready “very, very soon.” Continue reading.

Live updates: ‘Let’s stop this nonsense,’ Fauci says of federal coronavirus response as he comes under fire

NOTE:  This article is provided free of charge by The Washington Post.
Washington Post logoSidelined by the White House and harshly criticized in an extraordinary op-ed from a top adviser to the Trump administration, Anthony S. Fauci — the nation’s top infectious-disease expert — said in an interview with the Atlantic published Wednesday that the country needs to focus on a surging virus “rather than these games people are playing.”

“We’ve got to almost reset this and say, ‘Okay, let’s stop this nonsense,’ ” he said after being asked to state “the truth about the federal response to the pandemic” in the United States. “We’ve got to figure out, How can we get our control over this now, and, looking forward, how can we make sure that next month, we don’t have another example of California, Texas, Florida, and Arizona?”

Meanwhile, support for mask mandates continued to grow a day after another of the country’s top health officials said universal face-covering could bring covid-19 “under control” in the United States. In Alabama, Kay Ivey (R) became the latest governor to change their tune after initial resistance and issue a statewide mask order, while Walmart, the world’s largest retailer, said it would require all shoppers to wear face masks.

Public’s disconnect from COVID-19 reality worries experts

The Hill logoThe United States is being ravaged by a deadly pandemic that is growing exponentially, overwhelming health care systems and costing thousands of lives, to say nothing of an economic recession that threatens to plague the nation for years to come.

But the American public seems to be over the pandemic, eager to get kids back in schools, ready to hit the bar scene and hungry for Major League Baseball to play its abbreviated season.

The startling divergence between the brutal reality of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the fantasy land of a forthcoming return to normalcy has public health experts depressed and anxious about what is to come. The worst is not behind us, they say, by any stretch of the imagination. Continue reading.

Rep. Griffith tests positive for coronavirus days after speaking with unmasked members

The Virginia Republican wore a mask when not speaking

Rep. Morgan Griffith is self-quarantining and has notified colleagues with whom he has been in contact recently after experiencing symptoms and testing positive for the coronavirus.

Griffith spoke Thursday at a House Freedom Caucus press event in front of the Capitol and stood near other lawmakers and medical professionals who were critical of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for being too stringent with guidance on school reopenings. The Virginia Republican was not aware of any symptoms when he spoke at the news conference and wore a mask when not speaking, a spokesman said.

“He left the Capitol complex Thursday afternoon to return to Salem and has not been in DC since,” spokesman Kevin Baird said in a statement. “After the positive test, he has been notifying people with whom he has been in contact.” Continue reading.

Faulty data collection raises questions about Trump’s claims on PPP program

Washington Post logoBorrowers and bankers involved in Paycheck Protection Program say SBA released false and sometimes inflated figures

A trove of data on $517 billion in emergency small-business loans contains numerous errors that cast doubt on the Trump administration’s jobs claims and obscure the real economic impact of the program, according to a Washington Post analysis and interviews with bankers and borrowers.

A Post analysis of data on 4.9 million loans released last week by the Small Business Administration shows that many companies are reported to have “retained” far more workers than they employ. Likewise, in some cases the agency’s jobs claim for entire industries surpasses the total number of workers in those sectors.

And for more than 875,000 borrowers, the data shows that zero jobs were supported or no information is listed at all, according to the analysis. Continue reading.

White House virus task force member says ‘none of us lie’

WASHINGTON — A top member of the White House coronavirus task force said Tuesday that “none of us lie” to the public, an accusation President Donald Trump had retweeted, and that while kids need to be back in school as Trump insists, “we have to get the virus under control.”

Adm. Brett Giroir’s comment came a day after Trump shared a Twitter post from a former game show host who, without evidence, accused government medical experts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, among others, of “lying.”

Trump himself has at times disregarded the advice of his medical experts on the task force and continues to play down the threat from the virus as it spikes across the country, forcing some states to slow or reverse steps to reopen their economies. Continue reading.

Trump uses Rose Garden as substitute rally venue in onslaught against Biden

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Donald Trump used a White House event on China to excoriate his expected Democratic presidential rival, Joe Biden, on Tuesday in a rambling diatribe that turned the Rose Garden setting into a substitute rally venue, minus his supporters.

The Republican president, who trails Biden in national opinion polls, has chafed at his inability to hold large political gatherings because of the coronavirus pandemic.

His campaign postponed an outdoor rally scheduled for last Saturday in New Hampshire, citing a tropical storm off the East Coast. An indoor rally he held in Tulsa, Oklahoma, last month featured a partially empty arena. Continue reading.

Trump Administration Strips C.D.C. of Control of Coronavirus Data

New York Times logoHospitals have been ordered to bypass the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and send all patient information to a central database in Washington, raising questions about transparency.

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration has ordered hospitals to bypass the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and send all Covid-19 patient information to a central database in Washington beginning on Wednesday. The move has alarmed health experts who fear the data will be politicized or withheld from the public.

The new instructions were posted recently in a little-noticed document on the Department of Health and Human Services website. From now on, the department — not the C.D.C. — will collect daily reports about the patients that each hospital is treating, the number of available beds and ventilators, and other information vital to tracking the pandemic.

Officials say the change will streamline data gathering and assist the White House coronavirus task force in allocating scarce supplies like personal protective gear and remdesivir, the first drug shown to be effective against the virus. But the Health and Human Services database that will receive new information is not open to the public, which could affect the work of scores of researchers, modelers and health officials who rely on C.D.C. data to make projections and crucial decisions. Continue reading.

Ohio Man Dies Of COVID-19 After Saying Masks Were Hype

Richard Rose, 37, posted that he wasn’t going to buy “a f—king mask,” and laughed about going to a water park in mid-June. A few weeks later he was dead.

Richard Rose, 37, wasn’t buying the “hype” about masks in April. and laughed about going to a water park in mid-June. He died from complications from the coronavirus a few weeks later.

An Ohio man is serving as a cautionary tale after posting on Facebook that he refused to wear a mask — and subsequently dying of COVID-19.

Back in April, Richard Rose of Port Clinton, Ohio, made his thoughts on masks known:

Continue reading.