CORONAVIRUS: TRUMP PRIORITIZING CORPORATE PROFITS OVER MEDICAL SCIENCE

ITEM: From the Associated Press

"The White House overruled health officials who wanted to recommend that elderly and physically fragile Americans be advised not to fly on commercial airlines because of the new coronavirus, a federal official told The Associated Press.

"The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention submitted the plan this week as a way of trying to control the virus, but White House officials ordered the air travel recommendation be removed, said the official who had direct knowledge of the plan...."

 COMMENT:

This kind of thinking – prioritizing corporate profits over medical science – will simply aggravate the spread of the disease and increase the number of fatalities.

Trump can BS his way through the various crises he has instigated and then miraculously “resolved,” but this is one out of his control. The numbers don’t lie, even though he tries to lie about the numbers – the most outrageous instance being the cruise ship off of California, denied permission to dock because it would, in Trump’s view, make the administration look bad by doubling the number of cases in the U.S. under circumstances for which, Trump whines, his administration was not responsible. So the passengers and crew are confined in what amounts to a Petri-dish of contagion to soothe the president’s vanity. Latest report shows that something like 21 infected out of 46 tested. With the bulk of the 3,500 passengers plus crew not having been tested, the number of infected people aboard is probably several orders of magnitude larger.  

Since the outset he has attempted to minimize the seriousness of the epidemic to try to make his administration look like it has everything under control, when, in fact, just the opposite is true. Having previously defunded or disassembled major components of the government’s apparatus for dealing with biological threats, the Trump administration’s testing and containment protocols have been utter disasters, releasing sick people into the general population, so that containment is no longer an option and the number of people exposed has multiplied beyond the ability of the system to monitor. 

Consequently, the general opinion of apolitical scientists is that the disease will spread exponentially beyond the administration’s ability to contain. So the outbreak will spread through communities, very likely overwhelming the capabilities of the medical community to treat, until a sufficiently large proportion of the population has caught it and either died (3.4% mortality rate per WHO, a number Trump disputes as "too high") or recovered, providing herd immunity to quell the outbreak. Ironically, communities hardest hit by the contagion may become the safest places to be after it resolves. A key unknown is how long such resolution will take, so be prepared for the likelihood of a long siege comparable, scientists say, to the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic. 

Meanwhile the stock markets around the world are tanking, presaging a serious global economic contraction, circumstances in the U.S. the Trump administration will attempt to blame on the Democrats, Obama, the Chinese, the Fed, the man on the moon – anybody but Trump and his band of sycophantic, incompetent ideologues who place corporate interests above those of the people, as illustrated by the White House’s overruling over the recommendations of the CDC. Hopefully, the majority of the electorate will see through this charade and throw the bums out come November.