Tag: Trump inaction led to American deaths

Congressional Witness: ‘I’m a Republican. I Voted for President Trump … I Am Embarrassed’

Mike Bowen, executive VP of a surgical-mask manufacturer, was clearly holding back tears at one point while describing being inundated with requests for masks: “I can’t help all these people”

After Dr. Rick Bright, a whistleblower and now-ousted director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, gave headline-grabbing testimony before Congress on Thursday, a medical supplier whose earlier warnings about the federal government’s meager stockpile of medical equipment also delivered important testimony.

Mike Bowen, the vice president of surgical-mask manufacturer Prestige Ameritech, spoke emotionally about his more-than-a-decade-long frustration with trying to get the federal government to change course and curb its increasing dependence on masks produced in China and Mexico. Bowen claims a lack of action by three administrations helped lead to shortages that ultimately cost lives during the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic in America.

“I’ve said for years we can’t wait until a pandemic happens before we do something about it,” Brown told the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health.

He Could Have Seen What Was Coming: Behind Trump’s Failure on the Virus

New York Times logoAn examination reveals the president was warned about the potential for a pandemic but that internal divisions, lack of planning and his faith in his own instincts led to a halting response.

WASHINGTON — “Any way you cut it, this is going to be bad,” a senior medical adviser at the Department of Veterans Affairs, Dr. Carter Mecher, wrote on the night of Jan. 28, in an email to a group of public health experts scattered around the government and universities. “The projected size of the outbreak already seems hard to believe.”

A week after the first coronavirus case had been identified in the United States, and six long weeks before President Trump finally took aggressive action to confront the danger the nation was facing — a pandemic that is now forecast to take tens of thousands of American lives — Dr. Mecher was urging the upper ranks of the nation’s public health bureaucracy to wake up and prepare for the possibility of far more drastic action.

“You guys made fun of me screaming to close the schools,” he wrote to the group, which called itself “Red Dawn,” an inside joke based on the 1984 movie about a band of Americans trying to save the country after a foreign invasion. “Now I’m screaming, close the colleges and universities.” Continue reading.