Tag: Trump mishandling pandemic crisis

The Memo: Political tide on crisis threatens to turn against Trump

The Hill logoThe political tide in the coronavirus crisis is threatening to turn against President Trump, who faces what he himself has called the biggest decision of his presidency on how swiftly to recommend a reopening of a nation buckling under the pandemic’s economic strain. 

Recent polls have shown public approval of his handling of the crisis ticking downward. His overall approval ratings have followed a similar trajectory, reversing the gains he made at the beginning of the crisis.

Trump could also be hurt as the true magnitude of the economic crisis begins to bite. Continue reading.

States still baffled over how to get coronavirus supplies from Trump

Governors are trying any method they can think of — contacting FEMA, making Twitter pleas, calling Trump and going to the media.

Colorado Gov. Jared Polis was pleading with the federal government to send ventilators.

The state was starting to see hundreds of new coronavirus cases pop up each day, and Polis, a Democrat, worried that hospitals wouldn’t have enough life-saving ventilators to deal with the looming spike.

So he made an official request for ventilators through the Federal Emergency Management System, which is managing the effort. That went nowhere. He wrote to Vice President Mike Pence, leader of the White House’s coronavirus task force. That didn’t work. He tried to purchase supplies himself. The federal government swooped in and bought them. Continue reading.

How false hope spread about hydroxychloroquine to treat covid-19 — and the consequences that followed

NOTE: This is a free article from The Washington Post
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“But I think it could be, based on what I see, it could be a game changer.”

— President Trump, at a White House news briefing, March 19, 2020

“Hydroxychloroquine — I don’t know, it’s looking like it’s having some good results. That would be a phenomenal thing.”

— Trump, at a White House news briefing, April 3

“What do you have to lose? I’ll say it again: What do you have to lose? Take it. I really think they should take it.”

— Trump, at a White House news briefing, April 4 Continue reading “How false hope spread about hydroxychloroquine to treat covid-19 — and the consequences that followed”

Trump Lashes Out at Fauci Amid Criticism of Slow Virus Response

New York Times logoThe president retweeted a post calling for the government’s top infectious disease specialist to be fired after the doctor acknowledged that shutting down the country earlier could have saved lives.

WASHINGTON — President Trump publicly signaled his frustration on Sunday with Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the federal government’s top infectious disease expert, after the doctor said more lives could have been saved from the coronavirus if the country had been shut down earlier.

Mr. Trump reposted a Twitter message that said “Time to #FireFauci” as he rejected criticism of his slow initial response to the pandemic that has now killed more than 22,000 people in the United States. The president privately has been irritated at times with Dr. Fauci, but the Twitter post was the most explicit he has been in letting that show publicly.

The message Mr. Trump retweeted came from a former Republican congressional candidate. “Fauci is now saying that had Trump listened to the medical experts earlier he could’ve saved more lives,” said the tweet by DeAnna Lorraine, who got less than 2 percent of the vote in an open primary against Speaker Nancy Pelosi last month. “Fauci was telling people on February 29th that there was nothing to worry about and it posed no threat to the US at large. Time to #Fire Fauci.” Continue reading.

Ex-OSHA officials sound alarm as Trump quietly issues guidance telling corporations they don’t have to record coronavirus cases among workers

AlterNet logoPresident Donald Trump’s Labor Department has quietly issued guidance informing most employers in the United States that they will not be required to record and report coronavirus cases among their workers because doing so would supposedly constitute an excessive burden on companies.

The new rules, released Friday by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), were met with alarm by public health experts and former Labor Department officials who said the new rules are an absurd attack on transparency that could further endanger frontline workers.

Because COVID-19 is officially classified as a recordable illness, employers would typically be required to notify OSHA of coronavirus cases among their workers. Continue reading.

The White House pushed FEMA to give its biggest coronavirus contract to a company that never even had to bid

AlterNet logoLast month, as a deadly new virus swept over the globe, one Canadian defense contractor predicted on an earnings call that it would lead to a big business opportunity in the U.S. Thanks to the White House, that bet paid off just a few weeks later in a $96 million no-bid deal.

In an unusual move, even in times of disaster, the White House stepped into the federal purchasing process, ordering the Federal Emergency Management Agency to award a contract to AirBoss of America. The Trump administration has rushed through hundreds of deals to address the pandemic without the usual oversight, more than $760 million reported as of this week, but the AirBoss transaction is the single largest no-bid purchase, a ProPublica analysis of federal purchasing data found.

While FEMA placed the order, it was directed to do so by the White House, ProPublica found. Continue reading.

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.

U.S. passes Italy on recorded coronavirus deaths

Axios logoThe U.S. reported the highest coronavirus death toll in the world as of Saturday, per Johns Hopkins data. 18,860 Americans have died.

The big picture: More than 1,000 people in the U.S. have died every day from COVID-19 since April 1. China has reported fewer infections and deaths, but its reporting is encountering considerable skepticism.

Where it stands: Hard-struck states like New York, Louisiana and Illinoishave passed their expected peak dates, when demands for medical resources like hospital beds and ventilators would be at their highest points, per models by the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. Continue reading.

When you drown the government in the bathtub, people die

Washington Post logoI had been expecting this for 21 years.

“It’s not a matter of ‘if,’ but ‘when,’” the legendary epidemiologist D.A. Henderson told me in 1999 when we discussed the likelihood of a biological event causing mass destruction.

In 2001, I wrote about experts urging a “medical Manhattan Project” for new vaccines, antibiotics and antivirals. Continue reading.

As Virus Fears Mounted, Trump Scheduled Only 9 Intelligence Briefings In January

Even as his own experts grew increasingly alarmed, Trump did not have an intelligence briefing on his schedule until Jan. 6.

WASHINGTON — Even as experts in his own government were increasingly alarmed about a pandemic threat this January, President Donald Trump apparently remained unconcerned, with no scheduled intelligence briefings before Jan. 6 and only nine the entire month.

In the first week of the year, when dire warnings about the coronavirus and the threat posed to the United States reportedly began showing up in his daily intelligence packet, Trump had only one scheduled briefing, according to a HuffPost review of his daily schedules.

On Jan. 18, when his Health and Human Services secretary finally managed to reach Trump on a Florida golf weekend to discuss the threat, Trump had no scheduled intelligence briefing. Nor was there one on his schedule for Jan. 22, the day Trump famously told CNBC that the virus posed no danger and was limited to a single person who had come in from China. Continue reading.