Tag: Trump mishandling pandemic crisis

A former White House adviser raises disturbing questions about Trump’s hydroxychloroquine use

AlterNet logoPresident Donald Trump, for over a month, has been pushing hydroxychloroquine as a possible treatment for COVID-19, but not until Monday did he claim to be taking the drug himself. The president told reporters he has been taking daily doses of hydroxychloroquine for “about a week and a half now” to prevent the disease, though it hasn’t been proven to do so and poses serious risks. Dr. Sean P. Conley, White House physician, expressed his approval.

Sidney Blumenthal, a former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton, examines Conley’s approval in an article for Just Security and poses a series of questions for the White House doctor.

Following Trump’s hydroxychloroquine announcement, Conley said that he had discussed the matter with the president. Conley said in a press release: “After numerous discussions he and I had regarding the evidence for and against the use of hydroxychloroquine, we concluded the potential benefit from treatment outweighed the relative risks.” Continue reading.

Trump cites ‘Obamagate’ in urging GOP to get ‘tough’ on Democrats

The Hill logoPresident Trump on Tuesday urged Senate Republicans to get “tough” with Democrats heading into election season and referenced what he alleges was an effort by Democrats to sabotage his 2016 campaign and presidency.

Trump, speaking during a closed-door meeting on Capitol Hill, touted his poll numbers and the outlook for Senate GOP candidates in battleground states. He also called on Republican lawmakers to stay unified in the weeks and months ahead.

“He pretty regularly reminds us that we’re not as tough as [Democrats] are. That they play more for keeps, that they stick together better,” said Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.), who attended the meeting. Continue reading.

Trump: U.S. funding freeze to WHO could be permanent

He says the World Health Organization “is so clearly not serving America’s interests.”

President Donald Trump threatened to permanently end funding to the World Health Organization and pull out of the international body altogether in a letter blasting its coronavirus response and accusing its head of “political gamesmanship.”

The letter, which Trump revealed in a tweet Monday evening, listed a number of criticisms of the WHO’s initial response to the novel coronavirus in the early days of the outbreak in China.

He claimed the WHO “ignored credible reports of the virus” and accused the organization of acting too slowly and bowing to pressure from the Chinese government. Trump said that had Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus followed the example of the WHO during the SARS outbreak in 2003, during which it strongly criticized Chinese attempts to cover up the spread of the virus, “many lives could have been saved.” Continue reading.

The Lancet rebuts Trump’s coronavirus claims in WHO letter

The president’s statements about China and the coronavirus are “factually incorrect,” the general medical journal responded in a statement.

LONDON — A British medical journal Tuesday rebutted claims by President Donald Trump that the World Health Organization had consistently ignored reports of the virus spreading in China in early December, including ones featured in its publication.

In a letter published Monday, Trump excoriated WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, saying the organization had “failed to independently investigate credible reports that conflicted directly with the Chinese government’s official accounts.”

“This statement is factually incorrect,” The Lancet, a general medical journal, responded in a statement. “The Lancet published no report in December, 2019, referring to a virus or outbreak in Wuhan or anywhere else in China.”

Scarborough Spots Moment Trump Hurt 2020 Chances More ‘Than Any Democrat Ever Could’

The MSNBC host predicted how historians will one day judge Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic.

Joe Scarborough on Tuesday pointed out when he believes President Donald Trump did the most damage to his 2020 reelection campaign.

According to the co-host of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Trump likely doomed himself in April and May when he pondered injecting disinfectant to treat COVID-19, talked about taking an unproven cure and declared war on various government agencies and “every doctor or every scientist or every person who had spent their entire life planning for this moment when it came to vaccines.”

If Trump ends up losing the election in November, Scarborough predicted it would be those two months that would go down in infamy. Continue reading.

‘Trump is caught in a box’: Reporter details how the president made the US an ’emblem of global incompetence’

AlterNet logoWhat President Donald Trump had to say about coronavirus in April and the first half of May was considerably different from what he had said about it in January and February. But journalist Edward Luce, in a Financial Times article, stresses that even though Trump’s tone has changed, his response to the crisis has continued to be erratic and unfocused — seriously damaging the United States’ credibility as a world leader.

In early March, Luce recalls, Trump claimed that “within a couple of days, (infections are) going to be down to close to zero.” And after 15 cases had been reported in the U.S., Trump said, “One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.”

Trump, Luce notes, later acknowledged how dangerous COVID-19 was, but his response to the crisis was inadequate. Luce writes that for his article, he interviewed “dozens of people,” from Trump associates to World Health Organization officials — and found that “the story that emerged is of a president who ignored increasingly urgent intelligence warnings from January, dismisses anyone who claims to know more than him and trusts no one outside a tiny coterie.” Continue reading.

White House, CDC rift spills into the open

The Hill logoThe rift between the White House and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has spilled out into the open as one of the nation’s top public health agencies finds itself on the margins of the response to a once-in-a-generation pandemic.

In an administration often beset by infighting, the CDC has been a consistent target of criticism from White House officials privately frustrated by its initial handling of testing and its inability to provide granular, up-to-date data to guide the country’s response.

White House trade adviser Peter Navarro took the fight public on Sunday, saying the CDC had “let the country down” with its early testing woes. The comments were the sharpest public criticism of the agency to date from a member of the administration. Continue reading.

Is Trump Taking Dubious Drug? His Doctor’s Note Doesn’t Say

Once again, the Trump White House is releasing very creatively-crafted information surrounding the president’s health. On Monday, after President Donald Trump claimed he is taking the anti-malaria drug he touted for weeks as a cure for coronavirus, hydroxychloroquine, the White House has released a letter that appears to try to suggest the president wasn’t lying and that he is taking the dangerous drug.

But the letter, from Physician to the President Sean P. Conley, does not actually say Trump is taking the drug.

“As has been previously reported, two weeks ago one of the President’s support staff tested positive for COVID-19. The President is in very good health and remains symptom-free. He receives regular COVID-19 testing, all negative to date,” the letter begins. Continue reading.

Trump’s flimsy attack on vaccine official warning about hydroxychloroquine

Washington Post logo“So the so-called HHS Whistleblower was against HYDROXYCHLOROQUINE. Then why did he make, and sign, an emergency use authorization? … A dumb @60Minutes hit job on a grandstanding Never Trumper!”

— President Trump, in a tweet, May 18, 2020

Trump sniped at “60 Minutes” for airing an extended interview with Rick Bright, a U.S. vaccine official who alleges that the president’s political appointees pressured him to make an untested drug widely available and shuffled him to a new job when he resisted.

But the president left out the crux of Bright’s allegation. In a detailed whistleblower complaint, Bright says that he was sounding the alarm about hydroxychloroquine early, that he was “directed” to sign an emergency application for the drug’s use in hospitals despite his reservations, and that he did it as a compromise with Trump appointees who were pushing to release the drug even more widely.

The Facts

The Food and Drug Administration warns against using hydroxychloroquine to treat covid-19 patients outside of hospitals or clinical trials, citing a risk of heart problems. Clinical trial results, academic research and scientific analysis indicate that the danger is a significantly increased risk of death for certain patients. Evidence showing the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine in treating covid-19 has been scant.

Trump administration orders halt to ‘first of its kind’ COVID-19 testing at home project backed by Bill Gates

AlterNet logoThe Trump administration has ordered an “innovative” and “first of its kind” at home coronavirus testing program that has the support of Bill Gates and other public health experts to cease, and it’s unclear why.

The program, as The New York Times and NPR affiliate KUOW report, is based in Seattle, Washington, and allowed residents to easily test for coronavirus. One of the program’s benefits is 43 percent of its more than 12,000 participants so far were asymptomatic. To date the program has identified dozens of previously-undetected COVID-19 cases.

The Seattle Coronavirus Assessment Network (SCAN), operated by researchers from the Seattle Flu Study and Public Health – Seattle & King County, and had an “in-person technical adviser” from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was authorized by the State of Washington. Continue reading.