Coronavirus Links

Here are the links for my virus posts:

TIMELINE/DATABASE

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. 

POSTMORTEM: TOO EARLY?

(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.)

POSTMORTEM PART I: Intro

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.

POSTMORTEM PART II: isolation and quarantine

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no real plan, just the administration intuitively caroming side to side along ad hoc courses of action that they often rescinded, retracted or contradicted.

POSTMORTEM PART III: Testing

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.

POSTMORTEM PART IV: Action plan?

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.

POSTMORTEM PART V: breakdown of trust

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.

POSTMORTEM PART VI: the emperor has no clothes

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.

POSTMORTEM PART VII: a no-confidence vote

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?

TAKE THE HYDROXICHLOROQUINE CHALLENGE

A BROKEN COVENANT

POLITICAL ATTACK DOGS

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Postmortem Part VII: No-confidence Vote

   [ED NOTE: Some months ago, bewildered by the amount of oncoming data and information - and its misapplications - I started putting together a coronavirus database. That can be found here. Much of the information in this piece is taken from there.]

POSTMORTEM: Too Early?

Part VII

by Domingo Soto

And reality. In the President’s alternate universe view the virus had run its course or was, at least, on the ropes. He, if not the country, was back to business as usual. Rallies were being held. Safety protocols were no longer just ignored but now vilified. So, too, anyone that followed them. Help, he assured, was well on the way, a vaccine would soon be available, thanks to his masterful handling of the situation. He gave himself an “A” for a job well done.

But the public had by now little confidence in anything the President said. He had a history of palpably false statements, happy talk, and crazy thinking and it wasn’t limited to just his handling of the pandemic. His political capital was spent. Even if, charitably, one were to accept his claims (belatedly and as a result of Woodward’s revelation) that his positive spins were for the public’s confidence and sense of well-being, how to explain that as recently as late September, Trump was still spewing his voodoo medicine, only to be corrected by Dr. Fauci? 

The President would tell a rally that “Now we know it affects elderly people. Elderly people with heart problems and other problems. If they have other problems, that’s what it really affects. That’s it. You know, in some states thousands of people— nobody young — below the age of 18, like nobody — they have a strong immune system — who knows?....Take your hat off to the young, because they have a hell of an immune system. But it affects virtually nobody. It’s an amazing thing.”

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? 

It was not lost on the public that he had outrageously ridden the hydroxychloroquine horse into the ground. He had seized on yet another lifeline, beginning with a cheerleader’s tweet that said “HYDROXYCHLOROQUINE & AZITHROMYCIN, taken together, have a real chance to be one of the biggest game changers in the history of medicine. The FDA has moved mountains - Thank You! Hopefully they will BOTH (H works better with A, International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents)....."

Characteristically he would dismiss a hydroxychloroquine study that undermined him as a “Trump enemy statement”. “I worked with doctors,” he would say. “If you look at the one survey, the only bad survey, they were giving it to people that were in very bad shape, they were very old, almost dead. It was a Trump enemy statement.” 

It would prove to be a dead end, even drawing a reprimand shutting down his precious Twitter account for a short period of time. Not chastened, he would continue, moving on to a succession of snake oil remedies and hopeful panaceas, at each point rejecting the advice of one of the world’s most prestigious medical staffs. But what’s new?

Operation Warp Speed, designed to cut through the normal state of regulation of drugs, in this case the vaccine, had been a deft and incisive move. But over the months, the speed of the response and the President’s insistence that a vaccine would soon be available, now touted as a vindicating one-two punch, became a liability. The President had initially declared that COVID-19 would simply vanish. “I feel about vaccines like I feel about tests. This is going to go away without a vaccine. It’s gonna go away, and we’re not going to see it again, hopefully, after a period of time.”

He soon shifted gears, announcing that a vaccine would be available soon. At times it was by election day. Others before the end of the year. The medical experts reasoned otherwise, charitably opining that “it could happen.” But “probably not” hung in the air. Suspicious of the obviously heavy political undercurrents, the public showed resistance to taking the vaccine even before it was available. 

The medical and pharmaceutical establishments bucked the President, publicly addressing the notion that the process had been tainted by political interference. No one will interfere with the efficacy of their standards, FDA’s Hahn (and others) would state. 

That’s our current state: the reputations of our most celebrated institutions have been unnecessarily smeared, called into question, and - like the rest of the country - in conflict with each other; metrics, science and solutions, now tribal, seem without footing; and worse yet - even if one can condone the late start and misfires as just part of a learning curve - we are, nine months later and over 200,000 lives lost, dead in the water and without a real game plan, led by a man in whom we have no trust.

(CLICK HERE FOR THE ENTIRE SERIES)

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Postmortem Part VI: The Emperor Has No Clothes

  [ED NOTE: Some months ago, bewildered by the amount of oncoming data and information - and its misapplications - I started putting together a coronavirus database. That can be found here. Much of the information in this piece is taken from there.]

POSTMORTEM: Too Early?

Part VI

by Domingo Soto

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.

It was now mid-August. Save for the declaration of victory, there was no real plan of action. Quite the contrary, the medical experts had been essentially side-lined, muzzled, and exiled, now fighting, apparently, internal turf wars with Atlas. Whatever, battle discipline there had been was totally gone.

Or, more accurately, Trump had thrown his hands up in the air, seemingly banking on happenstance and luck. “It is,” he had said in a July interview “what it is.” He openly abandoned discipline. His worked at cross purposes to the safety protocols like social distancing and masks. He welcomed his coterie to question the dangerousness of the virus, its size, its potentiality, the numbers, the science and engaged in rabbit trails, like herd immunity (or “herd mentality” to use the President’s malaprop).  

How Did We Get Here?

Nine months later, we are dead in the water and drifting. How did we get to the point that not only do we not have a plan, we lack confidence in the process or the players? Whether the President was ill-qualified for the task is clearly a valid question. Regardless, the main reason we are here is his “quirky” personality, his overblown self-image, chaos complicity, and his fatalistic positivism. 

As a result of this outlook (some call it narcissism), nothing he has done is wrong or worthy of explanation. It is always the fault of others. While it’s easy to recognize the overt victims of his approach, in the long run it was the President’s credibility that suffered and, like the virus, what infected the entire process. Rather than fighting the pandemic, we are now at war with each other.  

Early on, Trump sought the alibi of inactions and mistakes of others. He chastised the WHO, eventually cutting financial ties, publically calling their work and motives into question and refusing to participate in the launch of a global effort on vaccines and drugs. China? Obviously. Obama? Well, hell yeah! “The system is starting to work out very well but we had to break a system like breaking an egg because the system we had was obsolete and didn’t work and that was the system we inherited.” 

Trump even pondered whether health care workers were responsible for the shortage of protective masks. By late April, he was floating the idea of withholding financial assistance to “poorly run” (Democratic) states. As the fiasco worsened and the issue of the proper course forward became more and more politicized, he would continue to double-down on this notion of “us” and “them”. Statistics became blue or red.

His main targets, however, were the health care professionals who were used, like his Miss Universe models, as not much more than hand candy or expedient foils. Not that they were all that compliant. Overall, they remained true to their disciplines even if, at times they appeared to cave to the pressure.  Dr. Birx, a woman of impeccable forensic credentials, would praise the President’s grasp of scientific literature and data details, words I'm sure she will some day regret. "He’s been so attentive to the scientific literature and the details and the data....I think his ability to analyze and integrate data that comes out of his long history in business has really been a real benefit during these discussions about medical issues.”

Dr Fauci, Redfield, Hahn, and the United States Surgeon General were forced to dance with the drunk in the room, right there on television, in front of God and everyone. At times their shame was palpable and at other times their pluck was a beauty to behold.

The CDC, one of the world’s most admired and professional organizations also walked the line looking like a Sunday morning stroll of shame: Granting authorizations for medicines and treatments at the President’s insistence; changing guidelines in at least the appearance of political interference. Solid evidence that would subsequently be revealed. 

With Atlas’ appointment even the meager subtleties fell by the wayside. The administration played fast and loose with an agency they now perceived as in their way. Those numbers, a Trump obsession, were tweaked. Efforts were made to retroactively change morbidity and mortality reports. Command and control of the CDC was moved to the White House so that even well-meaning mistakes or changes in situation became suspect to Trump’s Machiavellianism.

Not content with that, Trump minions would continue the practice of attacking  these doctors but amped it up quite a bit, accusing the "health care deep state" of engaging in “sedition” and being part of “left-wing hit squads” determined to undermine Trump and “preparing for armed insurrection after the election.” The government declared war on itself. 

[TO BE CONTINUED]

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Postmortem Part V: Breakdown of Trust

  [ED NOTE: Some months ago, bewildered by the amount of oncoming data and information - and its misapplications - I started putting together a coronavirus database. That can be found here. Much of the information in this piece is taken from there.]

POSTMORTEM: Too Early?

Part V: Breakdown of Trust

by Domingo Soto

As the conflicting interests between the economy versus public safety played out, now daily, the President was less an arbiter and more a provocateur, his thumb on the scale favoring the economy as the cure-all panacea. An intentional saboteur would not have been more pleased with the damage done - in the end, to the process - but as it played out, also to the players, the national and global institutions, and the country’s ability to short circuit the pandemic.

Health Professionals

It’s the ones on the front lines that take the first hits, here it was the healthcare experts. Not one for subtleties, the President, even though the Vice President was at its head, subsumed the task force’s managerial role via daily television briefings. There were immediate stress lines and, eventually, a fracture with a bully not merely at odds with the medical knowledge, but in battle with its purveyors.

There is perhaps no better metaphor for what might seem like a David versus Goliath struggle than Dr. Fauci, not just in physical size, but in temperament, ego, style, intellect, and professionalism. He would come to gain the nation’s confidence as the point man for the task force, often adding “nuance” to the President’s analysis. 

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. 

In mid-April, Trump would rebuff Fauci’s concern that the country was lagging in its coronavirus testing, saying publicly, “I don’t agree with him.” The day before, the President contradicted CDC Director Robert Redfield’s comments of a second wave, saying “It may not come back at all” and later claiming that Redfield had been "totally misquoted". To his comment that "You may not even have corona coming back," Fauci would respond that "We will have coronavirus in the fall. I am convinced of that because of the degree of... transmissibility that it has, the global nature." The honeymoon was just about over.

At the end of April, it was announced, contrary to what the medical experts suggested, that the federal guidelines on social distancing would not be renewed. Concerned, Congress sought Fauci’s testimony. On May Day the White House blocked him from testifying before a House panel. Much more happened that day: a watchdog who identified critical medical shortages was replaced; NIH abruptly cut coronavirus research funding for a Chinese bat study; and the Administration rejected CDC reopening guidelines as "overly prescriptive" and later that week, task force members were barred from accepting invitations to appear before congressional panels without White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows’.

The daily televised briefings ended on May 4. The following day the White House announced that it was considering winding down the task force, the Vice President saying that it was "a reflection of the tremendous progress we've made as a country. We are bringing our country back." Facing clap back, Trump soon reversed himself, saying the task force would continue “indefinitely”. The task force lay essentially dormant until mid-August when Dr. Scott Atlas was named the new head of the task force. Putsch accomplished.

[TO BE CONTINUED]

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Postmortem Part IV: Action Plan

  [ED NOTE: Some months ago, bewildered by the amount of oncoming data and information - and its misapplications - I started putting together a coronavirus database. That can be found here. Much of the information in this piece is taken from there.]

                                        POSTMORTEM: Too Early?

                                                            Part IV

by Domingo Soto

Action Plan

By early March it appeared that the Administration team was in full attack mode. HHS announced its intention to purchase 500 million N95 masks and plans to distribute them over the next 18 months. CDC would get $35 million to help state and local communities. The FDA granted the CDC’s request for emergency use authorization (EUA) so as to allow health care personnel to use certain unregulated (but NIOSH-approved) respirators. 

The FDA granted Roche AG an emergency approval for automated coronavirus testing kits and issued an emergency approval to Thermo Fisher for a coronavirus test within 24 hours of receiving the request. HHS announced funding for the development of two new rapid diagnostic tests, which would be able to detect coronavirus in approximately 1 hour.

Agriculture announced a partnership between USDA, Baylor University, McLane Global, and Pepsi Co. to provide one million meals per week to rural children in response to widespread school closures. Treasury contributed ten billion dollars through the economic stabilization fund to the Federal Reserve’s commercial paper funding facility. DOD announced it would make available to HHS up to five million respirator masks and 2,000 ventilators. The administration sought out public-private partnerships to develop drive-through testing collection sites.

By mid-March, the President had declared a national emergency and in the process accessed $42 billion in existing funds. He issued safety orders and signaled his intention to invoke the Defense Production Act, which he did two weeks later.

"My administration is recommending that all Americans, including the young and healthy, work to engage in schooling from home when possible. Avoid gathering in groups of more than 10 people. Avoid discretionary travel. And avoid eating and drinking at bars, restaurants and public food courts. If everyone makes this change or these critical changes and sacrifices now, we will rally together as one nation and we will defeat the virus. And we're going to have a big celebration all together. With several weeks of focused action, we can turn the corner and turn it quickly."

Plan, What Plan?

That statement, now six months later, is emblematic of how we went from an all-out (if somewhat belatedly) assault to capitulation and a hollow declaration of victory. It bears parsing out. It shows that while he was on the right track and knew what he had to do, his assessment of the strength of the problem and the duration of a campaign was, at best, naive and in the end, insufficient. 

Nor, did he have the resolve, or perhaps the ability, to follow a definitive and concrete action plan, to stay the course. Almost contemporaneously with his statement and the actions that signaled that he was leading the charge, the President was mixing his message. He appeared to balk at the chore before him. He immediately shifted responsibility to the state governors. On March 19, he suggested that obtaining medical equipment should be up to individual governors because “we’re not a shipping clerk.”

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.

This rift, as well as the one that would develop between the political and the medical operatives, would exacerbate what was already an overboiling pot. In early April, an exasperated Dr. Fauci cautioned states to stop allowing any exemptions to social-distancing guidelines. Forcing people to stay home is the “only thing we have”, he said. Later that month, though, the White House would issue guidelines on reopening and the President would declare that state governors should make their own decisions about when to restart.

The Role Model

While the medical and organizational mechanics of fighting the pandemic were crucial, the problem of optics, of confidence in the process and the players was constantly on life support, prey to what appeared to be an ad hoc, often contradictory and always quirky approach which no one could rationally call a game plan or, for that matter, a rational manner of governance. In the end, it was not just a matter of being rudderless. There was an untrained and irresponsible pilot at the wheel.

Trump continued to criticize governors for ‘unreasonable’ lock downs and engaged in what are, by now all-too-familiar fantastical declarations minimizing the potential of this disease. By the end of April, even though he was now having to admit the earlier death projections were wrong and might reach as high as 60,000 to 70,000, he was claiming that "the worst days" were over. Now rejecting his earlier warnings, he suggested that perhaps blanket testing was not necessary. "You'll see some astonishing numbers -- I don't know that all of that's even necessary." For all of his rosy cheerleading, Trump, a multi-front confrontationalist, found time to not only paint expansive day-glo pictures of optimism, he would scattershot blame and did so almost immediately.

At a time unity was needed, he plowed division, abetted by media friends like Ingraham and Hannity who claimed the virus was overblown and a Democratic Party gimmick meant to undermine his election.  “LIBERATE MINNESOTA!” “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!”“LIBERATE VIRGINIA, and save your great 2nd Amendment. It is under siege!”, the roiler President would tweet in mid-April. And, while attacks on the opposing party in the middle of an election campaign might pass as appropriate, he did so in such an equal opportunity and far ranging manner, that he damaged more than just confidence in the process.

[TO BE CONTINUED]

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