Here are the links for my virus posts:
I try to update this as often as possible. It has hyperlinks to the original source. Events such as elections, press conferences, etc. are in green. Quotes are in orange (Trump) and agua for others. I've limited editorial comment by others (in aqua) to things that I think explain something in context.
(Last year I started database on the pandemic and its origins. It quickly became overwhelming so I followed it up with a series of posts that I characterized as a post mortem on Trump's failed response to the coronavirus. The links to each post are set out below. This is a compilation of those posts, all written before Trump actually came down with the disease and, obviously, prior to the election.)
A diagnosis of what amounts to a self-inflicted wound is not just about incompetence borne of inexperience, but a malaise exacerbated by an etiology of inaction, conceit, negligence, petulance, impetuosity gilded with ignorance, penchants for infantile and happy talk, dogged insistence and actions by force of will, an indolence and unwillingness to study or work at the tasks before him, and an imperviousness to harsh and obvious realities.
January closed with the country having now reported its first cases. We had a tenuous lock down travel plan and we had an able and prestigious team of medical professionals. But that was it. There was no real plan, just the administration intuitively caroming side to side along ad hoc courses of action that they often rescinded, retracted or contradicted.
But no one was at the helm. Or, rather, not only was the person who was theoretically in charge not paying any real attention, he was betting against the house. Despite the repeated warnings and health alerts from the WHO, the warnings from our intelligence agencies and daily briefings, including the January 28 briefing and the President’s own February 7 taped interview with Woodward regarding the perniciousness of the disease, the administration began playing a shell game with the public. Testing, or rather, the data it would reveal, somehow perceived as a negative, was the key component of this guile.
This would soon devolve into finger pointing between the governors and the President, mostly around the availability of testing and PPE and the question about who bore the responsibility for obtaining them. By mid-April, a full-on range war had developed, involving even governors from his own party. Trump called them complainers. The critiques, first enunciated in pre-pandemic assessments concerning the confusion about intergovernmental and agency roles would soon prove much too true.
What was obvious in the back-and-forth of what would become a daily made-for-television political soap opera was Trump’s insistence that it was his way or the highway, science be damned. Fauci was but just one of the pieces in his reality show. Others on the task force attempted to walk the tightrope of fulfilling their ethical duties, avoiding Trump’s political machinations, and trying to effectively face what would become the President’s political backfires.
There it was; the emperor had no clothes. From bickering with his experts to finally scotching the task force “indefinitely”, he moved to appoint Atlas who was, although a doctor, mismatched in medical expertise, a Fox News commentator, and a member of a Libertarian think tank pushing the discredited “government is bad” theory of herd immunity. The President had left the building.
Nor is there walk-back from his obvious lies or sorties into weird science misadventures. Who to believe, the President who would brag that he had a predisposition toward science because of his ‘super genius’ uncle and who praised his own “natural ability” to grasp scientific theories, or the man who had made the suggestion about injecting bleach as a corona virus countermeasure?
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