In a former life, I was a Public Health Nurse, dealing most specifically with Communicable Disease in a small rural county in Missouri. I held that job for 7 years and I loved my work, but time and tide change people and it was finally time to move on. I had many great experiences investigating communicable diseases, working WIC clinic, and doing all the many-faceted things my job entailed. The county that I worked for was deep red and continued to get redder during my tenure from 2006-2013. I barely talked about my liberal politics and finally left, partially because of that.
My work investigating communicable disease sometimes included asking pretty personal questions. I once was doing a standard interview regarding Giardia, a water-borne pathogen that causes diarrhea and the man I was interviewing decided that my asking where he shopped for groceries was too much. It wasn’t always an easy job, but it was so interesting. I worked a rabies case in a horse that died after being bitten by a bat at a horse show. I investigated a Shigella outbreak involving 40 people. I also worked a norovirus outbreak in a nursing home and a food-borne illness outbreak at a church supper, that came down to what we thought was probably from turkeys that were cooled too slowly after cooking.
I was working in Public Health during the H1N1 Influenza Pandemic, which meant I was there for many tabletop exercises, agency planning, seemingly endless shot clinics, community coordination efforts, and so much more, including the Incident Command System, which is a flexible framework for emergencies of all kinds, developed by the GW Bush administration after 9/11. When our folks went to pick up our county stock of Tamiflu, there were reportedly snipers on the roofs of the pick-up point, stationed there in case of panic. We received numerous calls from a frightened public, one of which really sticks in my mind. An elderly woman called in to harangue us for not offering shots to the elderly at first and I carefully explained to her that people born before 1959, if I remember correctly, were considered to have likely have been exposed to a similar strain of flu and probably had some level of immunity to the virus. She insisted that President Obama was trying to kill all the old people and wouldn’t hear a thing that I had to say. I ended that call by saying, “Well ma’am, we’ll have to agree to disagree on that.” Another event I remember distinctly is a group of young women in their 20s coming in to the flu shot clinic and ultimately deciding not to get the vaccine because they “worried about it affecting their ability to have children in the future.” This was after I’d tried to explain that the H1N1 vaccine was made exactly like any other flu vaccine, it was just sped up as much as possible to meet the demand and prevent as many infections as possible. But we couldn’t guarantee 100% safety or efficacy, which wasn’t enough, apparently.
Despite my many disagreements with George W. Bush and his administration, they laid a lot of solid groundwork for Public Health response via the Department of Homeland Security, mostly in response to a bioterrorist attack, but the work really gave the United States a great framework, including the Incident Command System noted previously. The Obama administration took that foundation and built on it, and used it to respond to the H1N1 & the Ebola epidemic. They left a detailed plan for the Trump administration, as well as a specific office to deal with global health concerns. But Trump and his “best people” threw the Obama planning into the trash and disbanded the Global Health office in 2018, for whatever reason struck his fancy at the time… probably his abiding and malignant hatred of Barack Obama.
So fast forward to 2020, and the worst pandemic since the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918. So much has gone wrong with the Trump Regime’s response, but I think we all know that… unless we choose not to, of course. There were plans that weren’t just ignored, but trashed. There was a concerted effort to downplay the dangers of COVID-19 and the known airborne transmissibility. Trump admitted it was worse than the flu and that it was airborne on 7 February on the Bob Woodward tapes. (https://tinyurl.com/yyhm86fb) Additionally, per a NYT report, Larry Kudlow, the National Economic Council Director, on 2/25/2020 publicly said that the virus was contained and “pretty close to airtight”, and the next day he delivered a private message communicating concern over the economic stability & uncertainty due to COVID. (https://tinyurl.com/y2o9z9bv)
For months, before the Bob Woodward recordings were released, Trump was often given the benefit of the doubt regarding his response to the Coronavirus Pandemic. The Regime’s response was touted widely as bumbling, misinformed, and many other descriptors based on insufficient or incomplete information. What the Woodward recording lays bare is not a lack of information, but a deliberate & malicious plan to play down the potential severity of the virus on the public health, under the guise of wanting to “prevent panic”. Additionally, Jared Kushner, deliberately and maliciously guided testing and aid away from blue Democratic states that were getting hit the hardest initially. (https://tinyurl.com/y4uftxnb)
Even after the tapes came to light, however, the media has in large part continued with calling the response to the Pandemic as bumbled or mishandled. There seems to be an inability of the national media to call the response what it is: intentional, malicious & deliberate. Decisions were made at the very top of the executive branch to not respond and to confuse the message, all for politics.
Other deliberate actions include the way aid was sent to China: “17.8 tons of donated medical supplies … including masks, gowns, gauze, respirators, and other vital materials” on 7 February 2020 (https://tinyurl.com/waofk4l); and in May 2020, 200 ventilators were sent to Russia. (https://tinyurl.com/y7wq37f6). The choice of aid recipients is interesting, given the fact that Trump is known to be deeply in debt to both countries, and refuses to even entertain criticism of the latter. After all this, Trump blamed Obama of leaving the Strategic National Stockpile empty or with defective/broken equipment, but the state department was able to send equipment and supplies to other countries while letting the maintenance contracts for the Strategic National Stockpile lapse in summer 2019. (https://tinyurl.com/wmgltjj) In the meantime, the “blue” states were left to fend for themselves on the open market, which often ended in them being outbid by the Federal Government, or just having their hard-won supplies seized by the Feds (https://tinyurl.com/y455ojmp). This led Maryland Governor Larry Hogan to use connections through his wife to fly in a secret shipment of supplies from Korea. (https://tinyurl.com/y4pe69om)
The question I feel compelled to ask at this point is, “Who is making the money?” The old “follow the money” adage would be revealing, I am sure.
The Trump Regime has been really good at undercutting the experts that they do have on the so-called Covid Taskforce and muddling the message that the government is sending out. Dr. Anthony Fauci has been one of the leading epidemiological experts since the 1980s and has been completely sidelined, but does serve as an occasional whipping boy or prop for Trump. Dr. Fauci is often quoted by Trump as saying we don’t need to wear masks, however that was on 8 March, and is not the current consensus regarding mask use. (https://tinyurl.com/y23whmfd) Per numerous reports, Trump has trouble with focus except where he & his re-election are concerned, Olivia Troye, former Pence National Security advisor, also overheard Dear Leader say that he was glad that he didn’t have to shake hands with all the disgusting people. (https://tinyurl.com/y4kwrbmk).
Trump talks a fantastic game, but remains incapable of following through on much of anything. He likes to take the credit but doesn’t want to do the work. The real work of a proper COVID response would have included mobilization of the SNS, and proper implemention the Defense Production Act to make Personal Protective Equipment for healthcare workers, and test kits, just for a start. He said he did, but very little came of it… the usual fanfare and fizzle.
The bottom line is that Trump doesn’t like to work, or wear masks, and doesn’t like those around him to wear them either, which has led to the White House becoming its own super spreader cell. And since his cultists believe him so implicitly, it really doesn’t matter what the science says, they will follow him off a cliff… some have even tried using bleach (https://tinyurl.com/y9u2wknc), or taking hydroxychloroquine (https://tinyurl.com/v4h9kuf). Now that Trump has recovered from COVID-19, thanks to a team of dedicated doctors and nurses (funded completely by taxpayers, to be clear) and treatments well out of reach of the average American, demand is up for Regeneron, and we don’t even know if it actually works, or if Trump was just fucking lucky. (https://tinyurl.com/y6n7ep8l)
The Regime also continues to tout the vaccine coming really soon, never bothering to mention that most vaccines take several years to produce, the record being the Mumps vaccine in the 1960s, which took 4 years. Mind you, the development of a COVID-19 vaccine is likely to be completed in record time, given the scale of the disease and the number of agencies working on it worldwide. However, several companies have had to halt their Phase 3 trials due to adverse side effects and unexplained illnesses among participants. This is normal in vaccine development to make sure the science is right. (https://tinyurl.com/y53naloz) Trump and his crony Alex Azar shut down the Office of Vaccine Safety in 2019, which was responsible in determining the safety of all vaccines, and teased out whether vaccines caused various illnesses after people received them. The important question here is, “How will we know if any of these vaccines are safe?” (https://tinyurl.com/yxcfh4ny) Through his deadly arrogance, he decided that we didn’t need help from the rest of the world and removed the United States from the World Health Organization. This means we are pursuing our vaccine research alone and not sharing information and advances with all the countries around the world who are working towards the same goal. Trump’s politicization of the Coronavirus Pandemic, including kneecapping the CDC, has made his usual lies and promises even more suspect. I know that I, as a nurse and vaccine advocate, would be very wary of taking a COVID vaccine, especially if it had Trump’s gold star of approval on it. I plan to wait to see what Public Health experts say. I do know that 90-95% vaccine uptake is generally required to create the prized “herd immunity” that is able to protect everyone, including those who can’t take it for various reasons, including immunocompromise. I also wouldn’t blame people for being hesitant to take this vaccine.
The other issues I have regarding vaccine development are the things that we *DON’T* know. Given the fact that immunity only seems to last 5-7 months, but we still really don’t know for sure, is a vaccine even a viable option? (https://tinyurl.com/y2acdm94) Additionally, we have several documented cases of confirmed reinfection in which the disease has been worse on the second go-round. A vaccine IS the ideal path to eradicating COVID-19, especially given the possible lifelong effects, such as blood clots, strokes, fatigue, brain fog, heart failure, and other potential nastiness for its victims.
Why anyone would want to tempt fate by not protecting themselves & others from COVID is beyond me, honestly. Most of those folks seem to prefer Trump’s “herd immunity” approach, following him off the proverbial public health cliff. The Swedes took a lackadaisical approach to COVID, and now are slowly and quietly aligning themselves with the rest of Europe. (https://tinyurl.com/y3y9cktu) The US government has all but abandoned doing anything to help bring the spread of infection under control. If we’d had an effective response, we would ramped up widespread testing, contact tracing, isolation of the infected, mask mandates, and strict social distancing for the first few months, like South Korea and many other countries did. Now countries long considered “3rd world” are doing much better in terms of both infection rates and deaths. Ironically, Trump’s Freudian slip showed when he misspoke at the September town hall w/ George Stephanopoulos calling “herd immunity” “herd mentality”, which seems to be his real goal. Just unleash the mobs of the unwashed and let them get sick, if they die, they die. Also apropos of Trump, he wants to shut down the Affordable Care Act in the middle of a pandemic. Again, Trump putting personal profits over the American people… and bringing to mind the Ukrainian saying, “People are the shit money grows in.”
So, here we are, heading into the winter months, with COVID numbers on the rise again, just as the experts predicted. We are also in flu season, which the same experts warn could be deadly if combined w/ COVID. We have already seen a death toll just over half of the total US deaths in WW2 (416k). The University of Washington Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (https://tinyurl.com/y2wmly4u) currently projects another 163,000 deaths by 1 Feb 2021, totaling 386,000. If this trajectory continues and no control measures are put into place, we may lose over 2 million souls to COVID alone, not to mention deaths caused by those who cannot access hospital care for heart attacks, strokes, and other causes due to hospitals being overwhelmed with COVID patients.
The COVID pandemic is here, it is worsening, and it isn’t going to disappear “like magic” as someone has promised us repeatedly. There is no miracle cure, there is no 100% solution. There is science, which can be a messy process, but it will lead us to the best answers, but we have to accept that those answers can and will change as we learn more about the current pandemic. What we do know is that masks, social distancing, and handwashing do work, as well as limiting indoor gatherings. Those who refuse to believe this, like Trump, are harming others with their careless, selfish disregard for others. I have very little sympathy for them, nor do I go so far as schadenfreude… it’s more an attitude of “karma is a bitch and takes no prisoners”. Also, we can’t even begin to get the economy moving again until we address the pandemic.
The Trump Regime has shown itself to be willfully and intentionally malicious as regards human life, especially life in “blue” states and Anarchist Jurisdictions. We must vote Trump out and vote in someone who actually gives a shit about all the American people.