Tag: Trump mishandling pandemic crisis

Whistle-Blower Exposes Infighting and Animus in Trump’s Coronavirus Response

New York Times logoThe allegations suggest personal clashes influenced how the administration responded to the pandemic.

WASHINGTON — The call in early February from the White House Situation Room came as a surprise to Rick Bright: Peter Navarro, President Trump’s trade adviser, wanted him to come present his ideas for fighting the coronavirus, alone.

Dr. Bright, whose tiny federal research agency was pursuing a coronavirus vaccine, had long been at odds with his boss at the Department of Health and Human Services, Robert Kadlec. His White House visits, twice in a single weekend, only exacerbated those tensions. “Weekend at Peter’s,” Dr. Kadlec quipped in the subject line of an email that expressed his displeasure.

The hostility between these two key officials in the government’s response to a pandemic that has claimed more than 75,000 American lives burst into public view Tuesday when Dr. Bright — who was abruptly dismissed last month as head of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority — filed a formal whistle-blower complaint. The document accuses Dr. Kadlec and other top administration officials of “cronyism” and putting politics ahead of science. Continue reading.

Pence had CEOs remove masks before meeting with him — hours after his press secretary tested positive for COVID-19

AlterNet logoThe Trump administration is not only ignoring CDC and medical experts’ guidelines it is actively working to make Americans less safe.

On Friday Vice President Mike Pence flew aboard Air Force Two to Des Moines, Iowa, to meet with food industry CEOs. His flight was delayed after his press secretary, Katie Miller, tested positive for coronavirus. Several staffers were forced to exit the plane before it took off. Also board were Iowa Republican Senators Chuck Grassley and Joni Ernst, and Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue.

Pence held a roundtable discussion at the headquarters of the Hy-Vee supermarket chain. As The Intercept reports, five industry executives, seated at the table, all wearing masks, were approached by a staffer who asked them to remove their masks before the Vice President would come to the table (video below.) Continue reading.

In the early days of the pandemic, the U.S. government turned down an offer to manufacture millions of N95 masks in America

Washington Post logoIt was Jan. 22, a day after the first case of covid-19 was detected in the United States, and orders were pouring into Michael Bowen’s company outside Fort Worth, some from as far away as Hong Kong.

Bowen’s medical supply company, Prestige Ameritech, could ramp up production to make an additional 1.7 million N95 masks a week. He viewed the shrinking domestic production of medical masks as a national security issue, though, and he wanted to give the federal government first dibs.

“We still have four like-new N95 manufacturing lines,” Bowen wrote that day in an email to top administrators in the Department of Health and Human Services. “Reactivating these machines would be very difficult and very expensive but could be achieved in a dire situation.” Continue reading.

Eleven Secret Service agents test positive for COVID-19: report

The Hill logoNewly unveiled documents suggest nearly a dozen U.S. Secret Service members have tested positive for COVID-19, Yahoo News reports.

According to documents from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that were obtained by Yahoo News, there were 11 active cases at the agency as of Thursday. On top of those currently infected, another 23 Secret Service members have reportedly recovered from coronavirus. Another 60 employees are allegedly self-quarantining.

It’s not clear if any have recently been working at the White House or have had any contact with President Trump or Vice President Pence. Continue reading.

Trump sought a reopening but found the virus in the White House instead

President Donald Trump hoped this would be the week he emerged into a nation recovering from pandemic. Instead the pandemic came to him.

A day after breaking his White House self-isolation for a cross-country trip meant to signal the country’s readiness to restart, Trump received word that one of his Oval Office valets tested positive for the virus.

Two days later, Vice President Mike Pence’s press secretary also tested positive, setting off another round of tests, delaying the vice president’s trip to Iowa and causing more hand-wringing inside the White House about who might be infected. Continue reading.

Trump plays down coronavirus testing as U.S. falls far short of level scientists say is needed

Washington Post logoPresident Trump is increasingly dismissing the consensus of health experts, scientists and some of his Republican allies that widespread testing is key to the safe end of restrictions meant to slow the spread of the deadly coronavirus, saying Friday that “testing isn’t necessary” and is an imperfect guide.

The president has played down the need for testing as he overrides public health recommendations that would prolong the closures of schools, businesses and much of daily life. Although he is now tested every day with a rapid-result machine, Trump has questioned the value of extensive testing as the gap between available capacity and the amount that would be required to meet public health benchmarks has become clearer.

Trump’s comments came as a second employee in the White House complex tested positive for the coronavirus, a development that prompted increased testing for staff and other precautions not generally available to most Americans. Continue reading.

Has Trump Reached the Lying-to-Himself-and-Believing-It Stage of the Coronavirus Pandemic?

The reality—in both public-health and crass political terms—doesn’t look good for the President.

On Tuesday afternoon, Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan, came on the line with a breaking-news bulletin. Just before our interview, Whitmer had heard that President Trump was talking about dismantling the coronavirus task force he had assembled to oversee the national response to the pandemic. Whitmer seemed stunned by this information—U.S. infections from covid-19 were well over a million, the daily national death toll was often more than two thousand, and, in Whitmer’s hard-hit state, the crisis had already claimed more than four thousand of her constituents’ lives. “It’s just shocking,” she said, as we both tried to absorb the news. “Something new happens every day.”

By the next morning, Trump had, once again, changed his mind. He told reporters that he had no idea how “popular” the coronavirus task force was, and that it would remain in operation while shifting its emphasis toward reopening the economy and away from a public-health catastrophe that has already caused more U.S. deaths than the wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq combined. These are crazy times in American politics. What’s a governor, or anyone trying to make sense of Trump’s on-again, off-again war on the virus, supposed to say?

Whitmer, a first-term Democrat in a swing state that helped Trump win the Presidency in 2016, has become such a lightning rod for Trump and his supporters that the President has given Whitmer her own derogatory Twitter nickname. After long-gun-toting protesters opposing her stay-at-home order entered the Michigan capitol last week—some of them wearing Trump campaign regalia, and some carrying Confederate flags, nooses, and swastikas—the President praised them as “very good people.” As Democrats nationally celebrate Whitmer’s unyielding response, and as Joe Biden considers her as his running mate, both the Republican-controlled state legislature and a Republican member of Congress have now sued her for using her emergency powers to keep the state closed during the crisis. Meanwhile, in heavily Democratic, heavily African-American Detroit, health-care workers are struggling to contain one of the worst outbreaks in the country. Continue reading.

White House’s pandemic relief effort Project Airbridge is swathed in secrecy and exaggerations

Washington Post logoOn May 1, as White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany defended the Trump administration’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, an illustration of an airplane flying to the moon appeared on the monitors beside her.

“One hundred flights for Project Airbridge have been completed to date,” McEnany said, delivering “nearly 1 billion pieces” of personal protective equipment to the front lines. The flights had traveled 720,000 miles, the display read, equal to “more than 3 trips to the moon!”

Since the debut of Project Airbridge in March, the Trump administration has promoted the initiative as part of a historic mobilization “moving heaven and earth” to source and deliver vast amounts of medical supplies from overseas to pandemic hot spots in the United States. Continue reading.

Watch Trump unravel over coronavirus in devastating MSNBC supercut video: ‘What have you got to lose?’

MSNBC produced a devastating supercut video showing President Donald Trump’s ever-shifting response to the coronavirus.

The president started out the crisis by insisting it would simply go away, and then has struggled to keep up with the fast-moving devastation that has now claimed more than 76,000 lives — and shows no signs of slowing.

Watch the entire video here.

Visit the post here..